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AN ESSAY 



PRIMEVAL HISTORY, 



AN ESSAY 



PRIMAEVAL HISTORY. 



JOHN KENRICK, M.A. 



Ambagibus MYI 
Obtegitur densa caligine mersa vetustas. 

Stilus It aliens. 



LONDON: 
B. EELLOWES, LUDGATE STEEET. 

M.DCCC.XLVI. 



iosdos; 

richard kinder, printer, 

oreen arbour court, old bailet. 






PREFACE, 



The substance of the following Essay was intended 
to form an Introduction to a larger work on the 
ancient history of Egypt, Assyria, Phoenicia, and 
the other oriental countries, whose civilization 
constitutes the earliest series of connected histori- 
cal facts which has come down to us. To lay the 
foundation of such a history, it was absolutely ne- 
cessary to inquire into the evidence of certain long- 
established and traditionary opinions, respecting 
the events and chronology of a preceding period, 
comprising the interval between the origin of the 
human race and the commencement of the special 
history of these countries. Those who confine 
themselves to any one ancient people are not re- 
quired to give a judgment respecting the antiquity 
of mankind, or the connection of their various 



VI PREFACE. 

tribes ; those who pursue their researches upwards 
may escape from the difficulties of primaeval his- 
tory by breaking off, or turning aside, when they 
find that they have reached the point at which 
historical evidence becomes complicated with ques- 
tions of theological opinion. Such reserve is im- 
practicable, when we begin with the beginning, 
and endeavour to exhibit the early history of the 
East comprehensively, and according to the con- 
nection of its several parts ; we must either follow 
the authority from which such a history is usually 
derived, or assign some reason for departing from 
it. I found, however, that what I said, in justifi- 
cation of my adoption of the latter course, neces- 
sarily became more controversial than suited the 
character of historical writing ; and I have there- 
fore published it separately, though I am aware that 
it still bears traces of its original destination, which 
are not quite in accordance with its present form. 

In this preliminary research into the evidence 
of primaeval Asiatic history, it was impossible to 
avoid an inquiry into the historical authority of 



PREFACE. Vii 

the earliest portion of the Jewish Canon, and more 
specifically of the first eleven chapters of the book 
of Genesis. It is the last, and, as regards esta- 
blished opinions, the most difficult and delicate, 
of a series of questions, which have successively 
forced themselves into discussion, since the inter- 
pretation and exposition of Scripture have been 
emancipated from the authority of the church, and 
science and history have been independently cul- 
tivated. Not a single century, indeed, had elapsed, 
in which some struggle might not be traced, be- 
tween the supposed authority of Scripture and 

# 
opinions derived from other sources. In appear- 
ance, however, the controversy was confined within 
the limits of Scripture itself, each party claiming 
its sanction : it turned upon questions of meta- 
physics and ethics — sciences whose doctrines can- 
not be enunciated in very precise language. And 
as the phraseology of Scripture, in reference to 
such subjects, has that freedom and variety which 
belongs to popular style and popular conception, 
it was not difficult for those who held very oppo- 



VIU PREFACE. 

site opinions, to find authority for them in the 
same volume. 

The discovery of an inconsistency between the 
doctrines of physical astronomy and the language 
of Scripture presented a more formidable difficulty. 
A skilful metaphysician might undertake to recon- 
cile free will with predestination — a skilful com- 
mentator, St. Paul with St. James ; but to reconcile 
the Copernican system of the universe with a 
phraseology founded on the belief of the revolu- 
tion of the heavenly bodies around the earth, was 
clearly impossible. In this emergency, the head 
of the Eomish Church was prompt in his decision, 
and condemned the astronomer and his doctrine, 
that no suspicion might exist of an error in the 
language of Scripture and the long-established 
belief of the Christian world. It was hardly worth 
while, for such a difference, to encounter the risk 
of placing religion in contradiction with scientific 
evidence. For it might be said, with considerable 
plausibility, that nothing was directly taught in 
Scripture on the subject of astronomy ; that con- 



PREFACE. IX 

formity, in the use of popular phrases, to an erro- 
neous popular belief is no evidence of a participa- 
tion in that belief, and that much inconvenience 
must have ensued, had the scriptural writers taken 
upon themselves to contradict and rectify the pre- 
valent opinions of their countrymen on the struc- 
ture and laws of the sidereal heavens. It would 
have been equally unreasonable to expect, that they 
should interrupt their narratives of the course of 
Providence in patriarchal history, to explain the 
formation of dew, or the refraction of light in the 
rainbow. And such has been the answer usually 
made by Protestants. 

The peace thus established between theology 
and science was first seriously threatened by the 
modern discoveries in geology. While its foun- 
ders were groping their way through a chaos of 
facts, imperfectly ascertained and hastily com- 
bined, it was held sufficient to represent Scrip- 
ture as the safer guide ; and occasions of triumph 
were not wanting, as one ill-constructed geologi- 
cal hypothesis after another crumbled into ruin, 
a 5 



PREFACE. 



Gradually, however, from this chaotic mass of 
opinions, a scientific theory was evolved, founded 
upon careful observations, generalized by philoso- 
phical induction, and connected by analogies ex- 
tending over the whole globe. Though it might 
still be charged with impiety, it could no longer 
be represented as crude speculation, by any one 
who was capable of estimating its evidence and 
process of reasoning. Of the system thus erected 
it was a demonstrated part, that our globe was not 
brought into the state in which man was placed 
upon it, by a single and instantaneous act of 
creative power; that ages of ages had elapsed 
from the commencement to the close of this pro- 
cess, and that the production and extinction of 
species, in vegetable and animated nature, had 
been going on during the greater part of this all 
but infinite period. The cultivators of this science 
themselves were startled at the results of their 
own inquiries, and in no small degree perplexed, 
how to vindicate them from the charge of contra- 
dicting the authority of Scripture. 



PREFACE. XI 

It is evident that the old reply will no longer 
avail — that these writings were not designed to 
teach us natural philosophy.* This is not a case 
of transient allusion or acquiescence in popular 
phraseology. It is quite clear that the intention 
of the Hebrew writer was to teach the philosophy 
of the universe and the history and order of 
creation, according to the conceptions of his age. 
They may seem to us rude and simple ; we may 
be at a loss to reconcile them with the discoveries 
of modern science ; but we cannot doubt that his 
narrative was propounded and received in the full 
belief of its truth. 

Fresh difficulties have arisen with the extension 
of other branches of knowledge. The physiologist 
is embarrassed by the attempt to maintain at once 
the unity of the human species, its origin from a 
single pair, and the chronology of the Deluge, 

* liKOirbs $it> Mooae? ovre (pvaioAoyrjaai oi/re aGTpovo/M?iacu ; &AA 5 
els Oeoyuooaiav koX eirl ttjs Koap.oyovias avdpanrovs ayayeTu. Joann. 
Philop. in Hexaemeron ap. Phot. Myriob. ccxli. This, however, 
was not very consistent with the purpose of his work, av/j.(pwPov 
8e7|cu to?s (paivofxtvois r\\v tov Qeaireatov Mojaecas Koafxoyoviav. 



Xll PREFACE. 

which allows only a few centuries for the develop- 
ment of the most marked and permanent varieties. 
The ethnographer is equally perplexed by the 
multitude of languages, of different roots, struc- 
ture and analogies, which disclose themselves to 
his research in all quarters of the globe. History 
cannot now be confined within the narrow limits 
which the common chronology allows, even when 
enlarged by an arbitrary and uncritical preference 
of the Septuagint to the Hebrew. It demands for 
the multiplication and diffusion of mankind, the 
progress of the arts and sciences, and the consolida- 
tion of empires, a period far longer than the four 
or five centuries into which these vast and gradual 
changes have been crowded. The necessity of this 
enlargement of the time of primaeval history may 
not be perceived by those who are acquainted only 
with the historical and scientific literature of 
our own country ; but it is well known to all who 
cultivate independently any of these branches of 
knowledge, and have watched the progress of 
inquiry in foreign countries, where its results are 



PREFACE. Xlll 

made known with less of timid deference to esta- 
blished opinion than among ourselves. Such a 
state of things is embarrassing to science, and full 
of danger to the interests of religion; but till 
the difficulty is fairly acknowledged, it ban never 
be fully met. 

It is not at all removed by the reply, so often 
repeated, that religion and science, being both true, 
cannot be inconsistent with each other ; those who 
make the objection, and those who give the reply, 
do not use the same words in the same sense. 
The objector, when he charges science with under- 
mining religion, means that it impairs, by con- 
tradicting, the authority of the writings on which 
revealed religion is founded ; while the apologist, 
if he has any very definite meaning, understands 
by religion, those great and indestructible senti- 
ments of the human mind, which preceded, and 
may survive, all written records and all historical 
evidence. 

The difficulty is not fairly met by alleging, 
that there are obscurities in all ancient writings, 



XIV PREFACE. 

and that the high antiquity of those in ques- 
tion makes their interpretation especially uncer- 
tain. The apparent flexibility which Scripture 
has exhibited in the hands of its commentators, 
and the contradictory opinions which have been 
deduced from it, may have led those who are 
not conversant with Hebrew philology and bib- 
lical hermeneutic, to suppose the meaning much 
more uncertain than it really is. No doubt, the 
Hebrew language and literature present greater 
difficulties to an interpreter than those of Greece 
and Rome. Job and Hosea are not of such sim- 
ple and obvious construction as Homer and Euri- 
pides. It happens, however, that the portion of 
Scripture which relates to cosmogony and primae- 
val history is remarkably free from philological 
difficulties. The meaning of the writer, the only 
thing which the interpreter has to discover and 
set forth, is everywhere sufficiently obvious : there 
is hardly, in these eleven chapters, a doubtful 
construction, or a various reading of any import- 
ance, and the English reader has, in the ordinary 



PREFACE. XV 

version, a full and fair representation of the sense 
of the original. The difficulties which exist arise 
from endeavouring to harmonize the writer's in- 
formation with that derived from other sources, or 
to refine upon his simple language. Common 
speech was then, as it is now, the representative 
of the common understanding. This common 
understanding may be confused and perplexed 
by metaphysical cross-examination, respecting the 
action of spirit upon matter, or of Being upon 
nonentity, till it seems at last to have no idea 
what creation means ; but these subtilties belong 
no more to the Hebrew word than to the 
English. 

These remarks are rendered necessary by the 
very vague manner in which the phrase interpre- 
tation of Scripture is used. We are not surprised 
to find a popular writer, like the author of the 
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, (p. 407,) 
asking, " May not the sacred text, on a liberal 
interpretation, or with the benefit of new light 
reflected from nature or derived from learning, be 



XVI PREFACE. 

shown to be as much in harmony with the novel- 
ties of this volume, as it has been with geology 
and natural philosophy?" Similar language, how- 
ever, is held by Professor Whewell,* who cannot 
be ignorant, that the interpretation of the Bible 
is governed by rules as little arbitrary as that of 
any other ancient book. In his chapter of the 
" Relation of Tradition to Palsetiology," which 
is really a discussion of the most advisable 
mode of reconciling Geology and Palaeontology 
with Scripture, he speaks repeatedly of the 
necessity of bringing forward new interpretations 
of Scripture, to meet the discoveries of science. 
" When," he asks, ' ( should old interpretations 
be given up ; what is the proper season for a 
religious and enlightened commentator to make 
a change in the current interpretation of sa- 
cred Scripture ? At what period ought the es- 
tablished exposition of a passage to be given up, 
and a new mode of understanding the passage, such 

* Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Vol. II. ch. iv. 
p. 147, 8, 9. 



PREFACE. XV11 

as is or seems to be required by new discoveries 
respecting the laws of nature, accepted in its 
place V He elsewhere speaks* of "the language 
of Scripture being invested with a new meaning," 
quoting, with approbation, the sentiment of Bel- 
larmine, that " when demonstration shall establish 
the earth's motion, it will be proper to interpret 
the Scriptures otherwise than they have hitherto 
been interpreted, in those passages where mention 
is made of the stability of the earth and move- 
ment of the heavens." It is difficult to under- 
stand this otherwise than as sanctioning the 
principle, that the Commentator is to bend the 
meaning of Scripture into conformity with the 
discoveries of science. Such a proceeding, how- 
ever, would be utterly inconsistent with all real 
reverence for Scripture, and calculated to bring 
both it and its interpreters into suspicion and 
contempt ; and we must suppose the Author to 
have meant, that our ideas of the authority of 
certain portions of Scripture are to be modified, 
* Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Vol. Il.ch. iv.p.146. 



XV1U PREFACE. 

when we find their obvious meaning to be at va- 
riance with scientific truths. If this were his in- 
tention, we must regret, that he has not expressed 
himself with more precision, and given to a most 
important, but obnoxious truth, the weighty sanc- 
tion of his name. 

Aoyog yap ek t a^o^ovvrujv lihv 

KctK TLJV SoKOVVTlOV CtVTOQ, OV TCIVTOV G®ZVU. 

Eur. Hec. 294. 

Since, therefore, we can neither deny the fact 
of a contrariety, nor remove it by any warrant- 
able means, it is necessary that we seek some 
other explanation of our difficulty. The credi- 
bility of every historical writing must stand on 
its own ground, and not only in the same volume, 
but in the same work, materials of very different 
authority may be included. The various portions 
of a national history, some founded on docu- 
mentary and contemporaneous evidence, some 
derived from poetical sources, some from tradi- 
tion, some treating of a period anterior to the 



PREFACE. XIX 

invention of writing, some to the very existence 
of the nation, and even of the human race, can- 
not possess an uniform and equal degree of cer- 
tainty. We cannot have the same evidence of 
the events of the reigns of David and Solomon, 
and those of the period comprehended in the first 
eleven chapters of the book of Genesis ; nor can 
we be surprised, if, in the necessary absence of 
documents respecting primseval times, a narrative 
should have formed itself, reflecting the opinions, 
partly true and partly erroneous, of the people 
among whom it had its birth. Had the Hebrew 
literature not borne this character, the pheno- 
menon would have been unparalleled in history; 
it would have wanted a most decisive stamp of 
high antiquity had it exhibited, in its earliest 
pages, a scientific, not a popular philosophy. 
That the Jewish people should have been so far 
superior in religious belief, to the nations by 
whom they were surrounded, and so much in- 
ferior in culture and the arts of life, appears to 
me inexplicable, except on the supposition, that 



XX PREFACE. 

their creed had some higher origin than their own 
speculations and inferences. It is the natural 
consequence of this divine instruction, that their 
early traditions should be, as we find them, more 
pure and rational than those of their neighbours ; 
but it does not necessarily follow, that their pri- 
maeval chronology must be exact, or their history 
every where free from exaggeration and miscon- 
ception. 

These opinions may be startling to many per- 
sons, by seeming to derogate from an authority, 
concerning which " sanctius ac reverentius visum 
credere quam scire." Yet I believe it will be found, 
that neither our religious feelings nor our religious 
belief are necessarily and permanently affected, by 
the exercise of a freer and more discriminating 
criticism upon the Jewish records. Creation will 
still appear to us an example and proof of omni- 
potence, though in the limitation of its manifold 
and progressive operations to a period of six days, 
we trace the influence of the Jewish institution of 
the Sabbath. Neither the impulse nor the duty 



PREFACE. XXI 

of conjugal affection will suffer the slightest dimi- 
nution, though we should regard the narrative of 
the creation of the woman, rather as a simple and 
natural expression of the relation and mutual 
feeling of the sexes, than as an historical fact. 
Conscience and observation, no less than Scrip- 
ture, teach us the weakness and defects of our 
moral nature; these will remain precisely the 
same, and furnish the same motive to humility 
and watchfulness, and the same necessity for Di- 
vine aid, whatever may have been the first occa- 
sion on which man ; s evil passions broke out into 
transgression of the will of God. 

On the other hand, I am persuaded that there 
are many persons of truly religious mind, to whom 
it will be a relief from painful perplexity and 
doubt, to find that the authority of revelation is 
not involved in the correctness of the opinions 
which prevailed among the Hebrew people, re- 
specting cosmogony and primaeval history. They 
delight to trace the guiding hand of Providence 
in the separation of this people from amidst the 



XX11 PREFACE. 

idolatrous nations, in order to preserve the wor- 
ship of a Spiritual Deity, and in all the vicissi- 
tudes of their history till its consummation. They 
admire the wisdom and humanity of the Mosaic 
institutions, and acknowledge this dispensation 
as the basis of the Christian; they feel the sub- 
limity and purity of the devotional, moral and 
prophetic writings of Scripture; but they can 
neither close their eyes to the discoveries of 
science and history, nor satisfy their understand- 
ings with the expedients which have been devised 
for reconciling them with the language of the 
Hebrew records. I know that this is the state 
of many minds ; the secret, unavowed, perhaps 
scarcely self-acknowledged convictions of many 
others are doubtless in unison with it. And such 
views would be more general, were it not for a 
groundless apprehension, that there is no medium 
between implicit, undiscriminating belief and en- 
tire unbelief. It has been my object to show 
that between these extremes there is a ground, 
firm and wide enough to build an ample and 
enduring structure of religious faith. 



PREFACE. XX111 

To another objection which may be urged 
against the following Essay, that it sweeps away 
so much which has been regarded as historical, 
and leaves nothing in its place but a dreary va- 
cuity, I can only reply, that those with whom 
taste is a standard of credibility, should not en- 
gage in critical researches. It would certainly be 
more agreeable to retain the painted scenery by 
which the stage of history has been surrounded, 
than by its removal to open to ourselves a view 
into a region of doubtful light and indefinite ex- 
tent. Yet it should not be forgotten, that the 
fictions with which this region has been filled have 
proved an obstacle to the extension of true his- 
torical knowledge ; and however small the ter- 
ritory which can be gained by such extension, it 
will be of more real value than all that must be 
sacrificed in order to obtain it. 



AN ESSAY 



PRIMEVAL HISTORY. 



Primaeval history is commonly understood to 
mean, an authentic detail of the events by which 
man, as he appears at the commencement of historic 
times, is connected with the origin of the species 
or with the creation of the world. To believe itself 
in the possession of such a history, appears to have 
been in all ages and countries almost a necessity for 
the popular mind. The abrupt termination of the 
chain of dependence between the present and the 
past, the effect and the cause, is always painful. 
Religious feeling requires that the origin of the 
human race should be connected with some defi- 
nite act of creative power. The pride of nations 

B 



A IDEA OF PRIMAEVAL HISTORY. 

revolts from a short and obscure genealogy, and 
endeavours to trace their ancestry by recorded 
steps to the general parents of mankind, or to 
some one partaking in a special degree of the 
divine nature. 

To construct such a history for popular use was 
an easy task among the nations of antiquity. Its 
materials were found in the belief of the people 
themselves, among whom traditions of uncertain 
origin, reaching back beyond the commencement 
of history, came ready formed, but rude and im- 
perfect, to the hand of the fabulist and the poet. 
They were not embarrassed by historical criti- 
cism, and supernatural interposition furnished the 
means of solving every difficulty. Each nation 
usually assumed to itself the honour of represent- 
ing the primitive human stock, grafting others, 
if it recognised their existence, upon this indige- 
nous tree, and making its own country the scene 
of the events of primaeval history. Philosophical 
inquirers were content to regard mankind as 
living from time immemorial in the land which 
they occupied, or, if they were notoriously of recent 
origin, traced them by the light of tradition or 
conjecture to some other division of the human 
race. One school believed the world and man to 



IDEA OF PRIMAEVAL HISTORY. 3 

have been strictly eternal ; another to have had a 
definite origin in time ; x they speculated on the 
first abode of man, 2 but they left it to mythology 
to give a history of the steps by which he had 
emerged from his primaeval condition, and pos- 
sessed himself of the elements of civilization. No 
one national belief on these subjects was assumed 
as the standard to which all others must neces- 
sarily conform ; few synchronisms were attempted, 
and these only in recent times, and between 
nations evidently connected by affinity and early 
intercourse. 

The Hebrew literature, containing in the first 
eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis, the cos- 
mogony and primaeval history which that people 
received, became accessible to other nations by 
the translation of the Pentateuch into Greek, at 
Alexandria, in the third century before the Chris- 
tian era. Little use, however, appears to have 
been made even of those parts which might justly 
have claimed the notice of the Greek and Latin 
historians, the accounts of the origin of the people 
and the real institutions of their law. Even had 
the heathen writers been familiar with the Jewish 
cosmogony and primaeval history, they would not 
1 Diod. Sic. I, 6. 9. 2 Justin. Hist. 2. 1. 

B2 



4 IDEA OF PRIMEVAL HISTORY. 

have been received as of any higher authority than 
the corresponding speculations of the Indians, 
Persians or Egyptians ; the only result would 
have been, that a place would have been given 
them, among the Opinions of the barbarians re- 
specting philosophy. 1 

But primseval history assumed a new aspect 
when the adoption of the Hebrew Scriptures by 
the Christians, as inspired and consequently infal- 
lible, seemed to offer a connected and chronolo- 
gical record of the human race, from its very 
origin. 

At first, in the ages when Christianity had to 
maintain a struggle with heathenism for its exist- 
ence, the prophecies of the Old Testament, the 
types of the law, or the prefigurations of the events 
of the Gospel in Jewish history, chiefly occupied 
the attention of Christian writers. When, how- 
ever, more settled times opened upon the Church, 
and a more comprehensive literary culture was 
introduced, ancient history and chronology began 
to be studied. Julius Africanus, a Christian of 
the third century, appears to have been the first 
who published a systematic chronology. His 
work s which consisted of five books, is lost, with 
1 Diog. Laert. Procemium. 



AUTHORITY OF THE JEWISH CANON. 

the exception of a few fragments, 1 incorporated 
by later writers, but we know that it went back 
to the creation of the world, which he fixed at 
5,500 years before Christ. Eusebins, who followed 
Africanus, adopted the same plan, placing in one 
column the persons and events of Jewish history, 
and arranging those of Assyria, Egypt and Greece 
synchronistically with them. And this method 
has since been all but universally adopted. 
Doubts have been raised, as we shall see, respects 
ing the true chronology of the Jewish books, 
especially in the times between the Creation and 
the Flood, and between the Flood and the Call of 
Abraham ; but hardly any, except those who have 
altogether denied the divine origin of Judaism, 
have questioned, that could the original text be 
ascertained, its dates and facts must be implicitly 
received. 

The strict notion of the inspiration of the 
entire Jewish Canon has been modified in recent 
times, even in the schools of theology, much more 
in the minds of men of reflection and inquiry. 
In such an investigation as the present, it is un^ 
necessary to attempt to fix its nature or amount. 

1 They have been collected crse, vol. iii. 
by Rowth in his Reliquiae Sa- 



O AUTHORITY OF THE JEWISH CANON. 

For it is evident, that the credibility of a history 
can never be satisfactorily established by the 
assumption of its inspiration. This is to invert 
the true order of proceeding. If we find a fact 
predicted and accomplished, which the unaided 
sagacity of the human mind could not anticipate, 
we have recourse to inspiration as the only source 
of knowledge ; if we find a system of truth pro- 
mulgated, such as no human power of discovery 
could reach, we infer a supernatural communi- 
cation. So in regard to history; if what it 
records could be proved to be true, and yet no 
human means appeared by which such truth could 
be ascertained, there would remain only the sup- 
position of a divine communication. But such a 
case cannot really occur, because the very pro- 
cess of submitting the truth of history to inves- 
tigation, implies the existence of some inde- 
pendent evidence of the facts which it contains. 
The supernatural origin of an historical document 
can never, therefore, be made the basis of belief 
in its historical authority. 

Id the following inquiry into primaeval history, 
the Jewish records are not assumed as the sole 
and infallible source of knowledge. They are 
regarded as an evidence of the belief of the 



AUTHORITY OF THE JEWISH CANON. 7 

nation which admitted them among its sacred 
books ; a nation of high antiquity, placed in con- 
tact from its origin with those ancient kingdoms 
in which civilization reached its earliest perfec- 
tion, Assyria, Egypt, Phoenicia; a nation which 
possessed the art of writing from remote times, 
and applied it to historical purposes. Like all 
similar works, however, they are subject to be 
judged of according to the external evidence of 
their authorship and date, and the internal evi- 
dence of their truth, to be confronted with the 
records and compared with the belief of other 
ancient nations. There is nothing in these 
writings to forbid our subjecting them to this test. 
The book of Genesis incorporates written docu- 
ments of unknown ages and authors; the book 
of Joshua appeals to ancient poetical writings; 
the Chronicles of Israel and Judah are cited as 
authorities for the histories of these kingdoms re- 
spectively ; and while the legislator and the prophet 
claim to speak by the immediate dictate of hea- 
ven, no author of an historical book of Scripture 
alludes to any supernatural source of knowledge. 

Taken in that large sense which popular use 
has given to it, primaeval history goes back even 
beyond the first appearance of man upon the earth. 



8 HEATHEN COSMOGONY. 

Almost every nation of the ancient world had 
its own Cosmogony, including the origin of the 
earth and heavens, the elements, animals and 
vegetables, man and even the gods themselves. 1 
As they are only speculations, though assuming 
an historic form, they represent the imperfect 
state of natural philosophy in the age when they 
were framed. They generally agree in represent- 
ing a dark state of chaos and intermixture of the 
elements, preceding the distinct existence and 
separate properties of each as we find them in the 
present system. 2 In some, an intellectual prin- 
ciple presides over this change; in others it ap- 
pears to be brought about by the mere operation 
of natural causes, analogous to those which are 
now in action. The idea of creation out of nothing, 
of power exerted without an object on which it 
could exert itself, has always been conceived by 
the mind with difficulty, which seemed to be 
relieved by the introduction of a chaotic matter, 
on which the act of creation might be performed. 
The difficulty thus removed a step further back, was 
thought to be solved, and only the more reflecting 

1 Anc.Un.Hist. 1. 23. foil. 116. Ovid. Metam. 1, 4 seq. 
Diod. Sic. 1, 6. 2, 30. Beros. ap. Euseb. Chron. Can. 

2 Euseb. Prsep. Ev. 1, 7. p. 6. ed. Scalig. 
Diod. Sic. 1, 7. Hes. Theog. 



H2BREW COSMOGONY. 9 

Inquired, how chaos itself had come into existence. 
To facilitate the conception of an unknown pro- 
cess by assimilating it to something known, crea- 
tion was compared to the hatching of an egg, 1 to 
the growth of a seed, or the production of animals 
ignorantly supposed to follow the action of the 
sun's rays upon the liquid mud. 2 Compared with 
these rude efforts of the most civilized people, to 
solve the problem of the world's existence, and 
connect themselves by an unbroken chain with 
the origin of all things, the narrative of the Crea- 
tion in the Book of Genesis is remarkable for its 
sublimity and truth. It speaks a plain and simple 
language, ascribes everything to the benevolent 
purpose of one wise and omnipotent being, and 
relates the successive stages of creation in general 
harmony with the discoveries of science, though 
by no means with that exact accordance which has 
sometimes been asserted. But though such a 
narrative could only have been produced among 
a people divinely instructed in the great truths 
which distinguish revealed from natural religion, 
it has evidently received its form from the po- 
pular belief. To regard it in all its details, as 

1 Euseb. Praep. Ev. 3, 11. Aglaophamus 1, 475. 
p. 115. Ed.Viger. VonBohlen 2 Diod. Sic. 1, 7. 
Altes Indien, 1, 162. Lobeck 

b5 



10 GEOGRAPHY OF PARADISE. 

the authorized history of the changes of the globe, 
from the time when all was " without form and 
void," to the creation of man, would require that 
we should either close our eyes to the evidence of 
science, or adopt interpretations of the text which 
are not warranted by philology, nor in accordance 
with the obvious meaning of the writer. Such 
are the attempts which have been made to give to 
the words " in the beginning," " create," " day," 
a sense different from that which they commonly 
bear. Geology has shown that our earth was not 
brought into the state in which man was placed 
upon it by an instantaneous act of creative power ; 
and has established an order of succession and 
intervals of time in the production of animal and 
vegetable life, which were certainly not in the con- 
templation of the author of this history. 

The description of the original residence of man 
equally manifests this influence of popular concep- 
tion. Of the four rivers which had their head in 
the stream which watered Eden, two, the Eu- 
phrates and the Tigris, have their sources in the 
mountains of Armenia. And though by no means 
identical, 1 in the belief of the inhabitants of Meso- 
potamia, the native country of the Israelites, they 
1 Ritter, Geogr. 10, 101. 



GEOGRAPHY OP PARADISE. 11 

might naturally be supposed the same, By the 
Phison was probably intended the Phasis, and by 
the Gihon, some imaginary stream, to which 
various actual rivers may have contributed their 
share, bounding the land of the eastern Cushites, 
and reappearing in the Abyssinian arm of the 
Nile. 1 A belief in the existence of some elevated 
spot, situated in the North, is common in the 
popular conceptions of ancient nations. Such was 
Mount Meru to the Hindus, Albordj to the people 
of Iran, Olympus to the Greeks, and with this was 
readily combined in the oriental notion the flow of 
rivers to the four quarters of the earth. The 
learned volumes which have been written on the 
site of Eden and its four rivers, might have been 
spared, if it had been considered, that we have 
here, not the data of science, but the vague loca- 
lities and imaginary combinations of popular geo- 
graphy. 

In the same spirit we should receive the narra- 
tive of all the period which precedes the migration 
of Abraham, the true origin of the Jewish people, 
and, therefore, the point at which, if contempora- 
neous written records did not begin to supply the 
materials of history, at least a body of historical 

1 Josephus, Ant. Jud. i. 1, 3. 



12 UNITY OF THE HUMAN SPECIES. 

tradition may have formed itself. It describes the 
primitive condition and early degeneracy of man, 
and the first steps of his civilization, with a con- 
stant reference to a superintending Providence, 
and thus embodies truths of the highest moment, 
and in accordance with the conclusions of philo- 
sophy. But we see that these truths are not 
merely clothed in a popular form, but mingled 
with circumstances, originating in popular con- 
ception, and which may therefore not be strictly 
historical. Such accounts of times which precede 
the commencement of written history, are pro- 
duced and modified by the state of knowledge, 
feeling and opinion among the people with whom 
they originate, and these must be taken into the 
account, in estimating the historical truth which 
they comprehend. 

The variety of form and colour which the human 
race now exhibit, suggests the question, whether 
they are to be explained by an original creation of 
races respectively characterized by them, or by the 
assumption of one primary form, from which the 
rest have deviated under the influence of soil, cli- 
mate, food, and the other circumstances by which 
the condition of men is diversified. There is but 
one species of man, if we take the word in its 



UNITY OF THE HUMAN SPECIES. 13 

popular sense, that of an aggregate of qualities 
transmissible by descent, and so invariably found 
together, that where we perceive the existence of 
one we infer the rest without disappointment or 
uncertainty. 1 The print of human footsteps in the 
sand would lead every observer to infer the exist- 
ence of beings of the same stature, physiological 
structure and functions, intellectual faculties and 
moral sympathies with himself. All these are in- 
variably found together, the same in number and 
mutual relation, differing only in degree. In 
every part of the world, notwithstanding their dif- 
ferences, the tribes of men intermingle freely, and 
their offspring continue to multiply, unlike the 
product of the union of dissimilar species. It has 
been further argued that, according to the ana- 
logy of nature, individuals of the same species, 
however numerous or widely diffused, appear to 
originate from one stock, not from many; and 
hence that the human race has probably had 

1 The definitions given of into the Physical History of 
species by physiologists and Man, i. 106, says, " Species 
naturalists generally involve includes only the following 
some historical fact. Cuvier, conditions — separate origin 
Th. of the Earth, p. 116, de- and distinctness of race, 
fines it as "all the indivi- evinced by the constant trans- 
duals which descend from mission of some characteris- 
each other, ox from a common tic peculiarity of organiza- 
parentage." Prichard, Res. tion." 



14 ORIGIN FROM A SINGLE PAIR. 

its origin from a single pair, 1 all the actual varie- 
ties having been subsequently introduced. Little, 
however, can be concluded from this analogy, 
because we have no historical proof of such a dif- 
fusion of species from a single centre. All that 
can be proved is, that the regions of the earth 
have their characteristic groupes of productions, 
vegetable and animal, but as we do not see the 
species originate, we cannot pronounce on the 
number of individuals of which the first stock 
consisted, on merely analogical grounds. 

We find, it is true, traditions, as they are 
called, that is, a popular belief and apparently 
historical account, of the origin of the human 
race from a single pair, in remote and uncon- 
nected spots. But it is so obvious an answer to 
the question how they originated, to reverse the 
process by which they multiply, and trace them 
back to the simplest combination out of which 
increase can arise, that we cannot receive this 
coincidence, as a proof of a real reminiscence of 
a fact. On the contrary, these legends are so 
purely local, so intimately connected with the 
manners, productions and language of the region 
in which they are found, as to lead to the con- 
1 Prichard. i. 97. 



VARIETIES OF THE HUMAN SPECIES. 15 

elusion that they have been independently formed, 
and that their resemblance in the one point of 
supposing a single pair the origin of the whole race 
is to be explained by the cause above mentioned. 

Whatever difficulty the naturalist may have in 
determining, whether the difference between the 
European and the Negro, the Calmuck and the 
Red Indian, are what he calls specific differences, 
or amount only to varieties, the differences them- 
selves are palpable, and urge us to inquire into their 
cause. Two modes may be conceived, in which 
they may have originated from a stock primarily 
the same. Varieties spring up from time to time 
in the present races, we know not by what law, 
exhibiting individuals differing widely from the 
general type of the race, and as their peculiarities 
are genetic, that is, exist from the birth, and are 
not superinduced by accident, they are capable of 
being transmitted to a new progeny. If we sup- 
pose a variety so constituted, to be confined to 
itself, a race might in time originate, in which 
these peculiarities should be perpetuated. We 
see among the lower animals, that varieties thus 
arise, which do not vanish again, but remain in 
the line in which they first appeared. But in the 
human race the limits of these accidental varieties 



16 VARIETIES OF THE HUMAN SPECIES. 

are narrower than in the brutes, they bear the cha- 
racter of disease and deformity, and we never see 
them prolonged for more than a few generations. 
There is no known instance of accidental varieties 
giving rise to communities, all characterized by 
them, or of their being combined, like the existing 
varieties in colour and form among men, with dif- 
ferences in speech, manners and religion. Where 
no intermixture of races has taken place, these 
differences were not less marked, nor differently 
localized three thousand years ago. The Negro, 
with all his peculiarities of form, colour and hair, 
appears just the same in the paintings of the age 
of Thothmes III., fifteen centuries before the 
Christian sera, as he is now seen in the interior of 
Africa. Origination from accidental varieties, such 
as we see in the lower animals, would also exclude 
all idea of adaptation to climate, which, neverthe- 
less, in the case of the Negro, is undeniable, and 
probably pervades the other races also. 

It is difficult to assign limits to the influence of 
climate, joined to that of soil, food and modes of 
life, in producing changes in the human form. 
It is probable that its range was greater when 
civilization was less diffused, which enables man 
to protect himself against the injurious effects of 



INFLUENCE OF CLIMATE. 17 

the elements, and gives variety to his occupations, 
his clothing and diet. No direct experiment can 
be instituted to ascertain it, and the observation 
of nature's own processes is attended with great 
difficulty. It is but lately that scientific atten- 
tion has been directed to ethnography, or the 
description of the physical, intellectual and moral 
peculiarities of the different races of men : we 
have no means of comparing the same race under 
altered circumstances, or, if we perceive a change, 
of assigning its own share to each of the complex 
causes which may have produced it. In general, 
however, the survey of those races whose successive 
conditions we can ascertain, presents to us rather 
the proofs of the tenacity with which nature adheres 
to her established forms, than the flexibility with 
which she varies them. Still these forms are not 
absolutely unchangeable; we see nations whose 
language proclaims them to have descended from 
a common stock, 1 exhibiting a different complexion 
and features, according to the country which they 
occupy, and we cannot presume to say how far 
this assimilating power extends. No known effect 

1 It must not be supposed Scandinavia to Hindostan, 

that I mean by this expres- may, itself, have been spoken 

sion a single family. That by men of different physical 

common speech, the elements peculiarities, and this weakens 

of which are found from the argument. 



18 INFLUENCE OF CLIMATE. 

of climate is adequate to account for the existing 
varieties of complexion. We see no tendency in 
the Negro race settled in North America to ap- 
proach the colour of the Whites, though other 
peculiarities of the Negro are said to wear out in 
those who are the most perfectly domesticated. 1 
On the other hand, no tendency displays itself, in 
the white races established in intertropical cli- 
mates whose population is black, to approach the 
colour of the natives, if there be no intermarriage 
between them, much less to assume their osteolo- 
gical and physiological characters. The trifling 
infuscation which exposure to the sun produces 
is confined to individuals, and the children are 
born and grow up as fair as in temperate cli- 
mates. Yet, though we cannot discern in the 
effects of heat any adequate cause for the diver- 
sities by which different climates are distinguished, 
there is a general conformity between colour and 
climate, an adaptation in the peculiarity of this 
part of the system, to the circumstances under 
which life and health are to be maintained. We 
by no means invariably find the peculiarities of 
the Negro in complete combination; the deep 

1 Dr. Stanhope Smith, Com- Human Species, p. 55. 
plexion and Figure in the 



INFLUENCE OF CLIMATE. 19 

black complexion and the woolly hair are seen, 
without the osteological characters in some tribes 
of the Indian Archipelago. The nations of the 
deepest black colour, however, are in general found 
in the equatorial and intertropical regions of the 
old world, while tawney and fair-complexioned 
races appear successively, as we ascend to higher 
latitudes. 1 The apparent exceptions to this rule 
may be explained from the different elevations of 
tracts which lie beneath the same parallels. We 
must, therefore, either suppose that each of these 
races has had a separate stock, and as their shades 
are endless, the number of these stocks will be 
infinite ; or that climate has in some way pro- 
duced the diversities, which appear to follow a 
climatical law. In our ignorance of its influence 
we cannot pronounce this latter supposition im- 
possible ; 2 but we may safely say, that if all the 
varieties which we see have been superinduced on 
a common stock, a very long period must be 
allowed to accomplish this — a period in which 

1 Pricliard, Researches, bk. other race, and yet seems es- 
iii. ch. 15. sential to the Negro. M. 

2 The pigmental membrane Flourens, however, has made 
of the Negro has been re- experiments which show that 
garded as a proof, that this its rudiments are found in the 
race must have been from the other races. Edin. Journ. of 
first distinct, as it exists in no Phys. Sc. 1843. 



20 DIVISION INTO RACES. 

Time may have integrated the infinitesimal effects 
which alone can be marked within the limits of 
history. It is only, therefore, by a very great 
enlargement of the common chronology, that we 
can avoid the conclusion of an original diversity of 
race. 

Since these varieties blend with each other by 
imperceptible gradation, it would be useless to 
endeavour to fix their number on any scientific 
principle. The common division of the inhabi- 
tants of the ancient world into the Caucasian, the 
Calmuck, and the Ethiopic varieties, has the ad- 
vantage of being founded on obvious differences, 
and is well adapted to history. The name Cau- 
casian has been derived partly from the circum- 
stance that near this mountain, in Circassia, Min- 
grelia and Georgia, the most perfect specimens of 
this race, and of the human form generally, are 
found ; partly from a theoretical opinion, that the 
tribes which display the same peculiarities have 
been diffused from this region, as from a centre. 
Its characters are, an oval form of the skull, when 
viewed in front, an expanded forehead, a facial 
angle approaching the perpendicular, and a similar 
relation of the upper and lower jaw. The com- 
plexion varies from fair to a deep shade of black. 



DIVISION INTO RACES. 21 

To these are joined such a stature and proportion 
of the frame as are fitted to give the highest com- 
bination of strength and agility. To this class 
belong all the nations most remarkable in ancient 
history, the Indians and Persians, the Assyrians 
and the other Semitic nations, the Libyans and 
Moors, the Greeks and Romans, and the inhabi- 
tants of Modern Europe, as far as they descend 
from the Celtic, Gothic, or Sarmatian stem. The 
Ethiopic skull is narrow and elongated, as if by la- 
teral compression, the facial angle is less, the jaws 
and teeth project, the nose is flattened and turned 
up, the lips are thick, and the hair short and 
crisp. 1 The inhabitants of Africa in the equatorial 
regions exhibit the type of this race in its widest 
deviation; the blackest colour, the most woolly 
hair, the lowest facial angle, the smallest average 
quantity of brain and medulla oblongata, and a 
frame of inferior agility and strength. Where 
this variety reaches its extreme point of deviation, 
as in the Negro of the countries south of the 
Great Desert, it seems to be accompanied with a 
degeneracy of the intellectual powers, which has 
condemned this race to be, in all historic times, 

1 Prichard, Res. i. 289, seq. 



22 DIVISION INTO RACES. 

the slaves of Europeans and Asiatics. The ancient 
Egyptians and the other tribes which occupied the 
valley of the Nile, approached by their hair and 
colour to the Ethiopic type, by the form of the skull 
to the Caucasian, and this alone might prove the 
impossibility of fixing any precise lines of distinc- 
tion. The Mongolian or Calmuck 1 variety is 
characterized by the breadth of face, produced by 
the great lateral extension of the bony arch which 
unites the cheek bone to the skull, giving to the 
whole countenance something of a lozenge shape ; 
and by the flatness of the upper part of the face. 
In the Chinese and the Calmucks, the eyes are ge- 
nerally placed obliquely, with the internal angles 
descending towards the nose. The Finns in Eu- 
rope, the Nomadic nations of Northern and Central 
Asia, the Japanese and Chinese, belong to this 
type. In the ancient world they were represented 
by the Scythians and other tribes, who hovered on 
the borders of the civilized countries, and occasion- 
ally made irruptions into them. China and Ja- 
pan exhibit a social state, not inferior to that of an- 
cient Egypt and India, and may be regarded as the 
most perfect specimen of this race. In the Esqui- 

1 Prichard, Res. i. 305. 



THE DELUGE. 23 

meaux and Finns, its outward peculiarities are the 
most repulsive, and accompany the lowest state of 
intellect and manners. But Mongolian civilization 
hardly, came within the view of the writers by 
whom ancient history has been transmitted to us, 
or only at its close. To one of their tribes, the 
Huns, was owing the most remarkable revolution 
which the world has undergone, the overthrow of 
the Roman empire, and the settlement of the 
Germans in Western Europe. 

Primaeval History is usually divided into the 
Ante-diluvian and Post-diluvian period. If the 
whole of the human race, except eight persons, 
had really been destroyed, and all traces of the 
past works of man obliterated by a flood, which 
covered the whole earth, such an event must have 
made not only a division but a chasm in history. 1 
Knowledge and art, being reduced to the indivi- 
dual attainments of the survivors of this cata- 
strophe, must have begun their course of improve- 
ment almost from the elements. Society must 

1 I do not examine the at- not admit any other. Heevi- 

tempts which have been made dently believed, that the whole 

to show, that the writer of the earth was covered by the 

book of Genesis meant to deluge, and that the whole 

speak only of a partial flood, human race, as it existed in 

because they rest on no phi- his day, was derived from the 

lological ground, and we can- sons of Noah. 



24 THE DELUGE. 

have retraced all its stages, from that of a single 
family to civilized empires. The surface of the 
earth must have been brought into such a state 
by the weight and agitation of a flood which rose 
to the level of the highest mountains, that in the 
attempt to resume its cultivation, men must have 
experienced the most formidable difficulties, and 
must have spread and multiplied much less ra- 
pidly than in the ordinary state of the world. 
Attempts have indeed been made, to show that 
the destruction of the human race would be soon 
supplied by its power of increase, and that even 
the shortest interval between the Flood and the 
appearance of populous kingdoms in history, which 
the common chronology allows, would suffice to 
call many millions into existence. But in coun- 
tries reduced to such a state as that in which Asia 
must have been after the flood, it is impossible 
that men should multiply in that geometrical 
ratio, by which their numbers rise so rapidly 
under the pen of the calculator. x Every thing 
which contributes to the protection and support 
of man, must have been recreated ; and as nature 
does less for the supply of his wants, than those of 

1 The calculations of Peta- may be seen in the Anc. Un. 
vius, Cumberland and Winston Hist. 1, 361. 



EVIDENCE OF GEOLOGY. 25 

the brutes, they would increase more rapidly than 
he did, and add to the difficulties which impeded 
his diffusion. 

The evidence of geology has been appealed to 
in proof of the occurrence of the Deluge. x When 
first the existence of aquatic animals in the solid 
strata was noticed, such a submersion of the earth 
was supposed to have brought them there. By 
more careful study and reasoning it Was perceived, 
that instead of indicating a sudden action of water, 
limited to the surface, and strictly confined to the 
period of a year, 2 these phenomena were the 
result of causes tranquilly operating through a 
long series of ages, in the depths of the ocean, or 
in lakes of fresh water, and this hypothesis was 
necessarily abandoned. 

It was subsequently made evident, that since 
the deposition and elevation of the most recent 
strata, the earth's surface has been violently torn 
by currents of water, which have transported 

1 The existence of a Deluge tion of the forces of the sun 
is certainly not disproved by and moon could raise a tide 
showing that there exists no which should cover the tops 
natural cause adequate to its of the mountains. See Hum- 
production. Yet it is impor- boldt's Cosmos, p. 325. 
tant to remark, that Bessel 2 Gen. viii. 11, 13. 
has proved, that no combina- 



26 EVIDENCE OF GEOLOGY. 

blocks of stone, accumulated hills of gravel, and 
imbedded in them the remains of land animals 
now no longer existing, or natives of countries 
very remote from those in which these remains 
are now found. This class of phenomena became 
in its turn the evidence of the Deluge. 1 Further 
investigation, however, showed, that they were 
the results of prolonged, repeated, and multiform 
currents of water, the later of which had modi- 
fied the results of the earlier : the gravel of which 
the beds were composed was found to have been 
drifted from various centres and in opposite direc- 
tions ; the animals whose remains were preserved 
in them, to belong to different seras of extinct 
zoology. 2 Nor could the annihilation of their races 
be consistently referred to an event expressly de- 
scribed as intended for their preservation. 3 It 
must therefore be acknowledged, that geology 
affords no specific confirmation to the Jewish 
account of the Deluge, although it gives abundant 



1 Bucldand's Reliquiee Di- 1823. The opinion expressed 
luvianse, Observations on the in this work is retracted in 
organic remains contained in the same author's Bridge- 
caves, fissures and diluvial water Treatise, i. p. 94. 
gravel and other geological 2 Ansted's Geology, 2, 121. 
phenomena, attesting the ac- 3 Gen. vi. 19. 
tion of an Universal Deluge. 



CHALDiEAN AND INDIAN DELUGE. 27 

testimony to the submersion of almost every part 
of the globe, under circumstances different from 
those which this narrative describes. 

Should future research show, that in the latest 
results of what has been called the Diluvial period, 
the remains of man exist, along with those of 
mammalia, belonging partly to extinct and partly 
to existing species, we shall still be far removed 
from the proof of a simultaneous and universal 
Deluge. The retention of the name Diluvial, which 
was originally understood to mean, produced by 
the Noachic Deluge, leads to much popular mis- 
apprehension. Among geologists themselves, it is 
now recognized only as a convenient name for those 
results of moving water, which exceed the power 
of the present rivers, even in their highest state of 
flood. 

The early histories of many nations include 
traditionary accounts of a Deluge which has de- 
stroyed either the whole human race, or the popu- 
lation of the country in which it happened. They 
have been received, like the geological facts before 
mentioned, too indiscriminately, as evidence in 
favour of the common opinion ; and, therefore, it 
will be necessary to examine them separately. 
The. most striking coincidence with the Hebrew 
c2 



28 CHALDEAN AND INDIAN DELUGE. 

account is found in the Babylonian traditions, as 
preserved by Berosus and quoted by Josephus 
and Eusebius. 1 The number of ten kings, said to 
have reigned in Chaldsea before the Flood, corre- 
sponds with the number of ten generations, inter- 
vening between Adam and Noah, 2 though neither 
in the names, nor actions, nor length of life attri- 
buted to them, can any resemblance be traced to 
the antediluvian patriarchs. The tenth in succes- 
sion was Xisuthrus, who was warned by Saturn 
that the world would be destroyed by a flood, and 
built an ark in which he saved himself, his family, 
and animals of all kinds. On the flood's subsiding, 
he let loose some birds from the ark, who, on their 
second flight, returned, having their feet daubed 
with mud ; and at length came back no more ; 
whence Xisuthrus, concluding that the surface of 
the earth had re-appeared from beneath the waters, 
descended from his ark upon the mountains of 
Armenia, raised an altar, and worshipped the gods. 
The Zend-Avesta, the sacred book of the followers 
of Zoroaster, contains the mention of a deluge, 
but the circumstances of it bear no resemblance 



1 Euseb. Prsep. Evang. lib. 2 Euseb. Chron. Gr. p. 5. 
ix. p. 414. Chron. Armen. i. ed. Scalig. 
p. 31. Jos. Ant. 1, 3, 6. 



INDIAN AND MEXICAN DELUGE. 29 

to the Mosaic narrative. The earth is covered 
with a flood of waters, from which Mount Albordj 
first emerges, but instead of being sent for the 
destruction of the human race, it is the source of 
the rivers, and of all the other benefits which the 
element of water produces to mankind. 1 Accord- 
ing to the Hindu tradition of the incarnation of 
Vischnu, the Preserver, in the form of a fish, 
Menu was commanded by him to build a ship, in 
which to save himself and seven holy persons, 
with seeds of all sorts and beasts of the field, 
from the deluge which was about to destroy a 
wicked race. The flood rises, the ship rests on 
the top of Himavan, and Menu becomes the father 
of a new race. 2 Remarkable coincidences with the 
Jewish account of the Deluge have also been pointed 
out, in the traditions of the Mexican and other 
American nations; and as they are found com- 
bined with a close resemblance in their astrono- 
mical systems to the science of the oldest people 
in Asia, it seems more natural to suppose that this 
traditional belief in a deluge was brought by the 
progenitors of the Mexicans from their ancient 

1 Bundehesch, § 7. Kleu- hended by Mr. Faber, Pagan 
ker's Zendavesta, 3, 68. It Idolatry, 2, 60. 
has been strangely misappre- 2 Bohlen altes Indien,! , 218= 



30 GREEK TRADITIONS. 

Asiatic abodes, than that it originated in the New 
World. 1 The Phrygian legend of Annacus or 
Nannacus, does not go beyond the fact of a 
deluge. 2 Among the Phoenicians we find no men- 
tion of such a tradition, though from the resem- 
blance of their cosmogony with the Jewish, we 
might have expected it. The priests of Sais, when 
Solon mentioned the flood of Deucalion, ridiculed 
the novelty and imperfection of the Greek tradi- 
tion, alleging that there had been, and would be, 
many partial destructions of the human race, both 
by fire and water; and Plato himself who re- 
cords this conversation, speaks in his own person 
in the same strain. 3 These are evidently not tra- 
ditions of an historical event, such as the Mosaic 
deluge, but fanciful speculations. 4 Nor has any- 
thing come to light in the monuments of Egypt, 

1 Clavigero, Hist. Mex. Eng. identified with the universal 
Transl. i, 244. PL 19. p. 410. deluge recorded in the Old 
464. Testament. After a careful 

2 Suidas sub voce Nawa- perusal of their own written 
kos. accounts, we feel persuaded 

3 Tim. iii. 21 seq. Critias, that this deluge of the Chi- 
iii. 111. nese is described, rather as 

4 " To the period -of Yaou, interrupting the business of 
something more than 2000 agriculture, than as involving 
years before our sera, the Chi- a general destruction of the 
nese carry back their tradition human race." — Davis, The 
of an extensive flood, which Chinese, vol. i. p. 140. 

by some persons has been 



FLOOD OF DEUCALION. 31 

indicating an affinity in this point with the Asiatic 
tradition. 1 

The name of Deucalion appears early in the 
remains of Greek literature,, but at first only as 
the mythical patriarch of the Hellenic race. 2 The 
subjects of the Homeric poems would not natu- 
rally lead to the mention of the flood ; but it could 
hardly have been omitted by Hesiod, in his deduc- 
tion of the history of mankind through its ages of 
gold, silver, brass and iron, 3 had it been known to 
him, at least as anything more than a local flood 
in Thessaly. The account of Deucalion, given by 
Apollodorus (1. 7. 2.), bears evident marks of being 
compounded of two fables originally distinct, in 
one of which, and probably the older, the descent 
of the Hellenes was traced through Deucalion 
to Prometheus and Pandora, without the mention 



1 Manetho, as quoted by tuum vetustorum, adventare 

Syncellus, p. 40, appears to diluvium prasscii, metuentes- 

speak of the sacred books of que ne caerimoniarum oblite- 

Thotb, as translated after the raretur memoria, penitus ope- 

Deluge into Greek, by the rosis digestos fodinis per loca 

second Hermes ; but this ab- diversa struxerunt." But this 

surdity cannot have proceeded account is too late, and too 

from Manetho himself, whose full of obvious errors, to me- 

name has been borrowed by rit any credit, 

some later writer. Ammianus 3 Hesiod, quoted by Strabo, 

Marcellinus, 22, 15, speaking 7. p. 446. ed. Oxf. 

of the Egyptian grottoes, says: 3 Hes. Works and Days, 

" Syringes ut fertur, periti ri- 107 — 172. 



32 FLOOD OF DEUCALION. 

of a deluge. In the other, the destruction of the 
brazen race by a flood, and the re-peopling of the 
earth by the casting of stones, is related in the 
common way. That these two narratives cannot 
originally have belonged to the same mythus, is 
evident from their incongruity; for as mankind were 
created by Prometheus, the father of Deucalion, 
there was no time for them to have passed through 
those stages of degeneracy, by which they reached 
the depravity of the brazen age. It is doubtful, 
therefore, whether the tradition of Deucalion's 
flood is older than the time when the intercourse 
with Asia began to be frequent. Hellanicus, 1 
about the beginning of the fifth century before 
Christ, appears to have mentioned the ark in 
which he saved himself, as resting on Mount 
Othrys in Thessaly. Pindar, in his ninth Olym- 
pian, describes Deucalion and Pyrrha as descend- 
ing from Parnassus, and re-peopling the earth by a 
race sprung from stones. 2 As we reach the time 
when the Greeks enjoyed more extensive and lei- 

1 Schol. Pind. 9, 60. ed. by diseases, and in many other 

Boeckh. ways. On one of these de- 

3 The iraXcuol x6yoi of which luges, in which all but a few 

Plato speaks, Leg. 3. 2, 677, perished, he builds, as many 

related that many destruc- have done since, a theory of 

tions of mankind had taken the progress of society, 
place, some by deluges, some 



FLOOD OF OGYGES. 33 

surely communication with Asia, through the con- 
quests of Alexander, we find new circumstances 
introduced into the story, which assimilate it more 
closely to the Asiatic tradition. Plutarch mentions 
the dove, and its employment to ascertain that 
the waters of the inundation had retired. 1 Lucian, 
an Asiatic Greek, in describing the legends of the 
temple of Hierapolis, adds the circumstance, that 
the sons of Deucalion, with their wives, and pairs 
of all living animals, were preserved in the ark ; 2 
and thus, when we reach the country in which the 
tradition first appears, we find the closest con- 
formity to the narrative in Genesis. The flood of 
Ogyges has no claim to be considered as a tradi- 
tion of a general deluge ; his name, as a king of 
Attica, does not occur in any extant author before 
the age of Alexander, and the story of his flood ap- 
pears to belong to Bceotia, a country very subject 
to inundations from the stoppage of the outlets, by 
which the Lake Copais discharges itself into the sea. 3 
It must thus appear very doubtful whether the 
earliest mythology of the Greeks contained any 



1 Plut. viii. 930. ed. Wyt- thor of this treatise ; but the 

tenb. (968 F.) question is of no importance 

5 Luc. de Dea Syria, § 12. in reference to our inquiry. 
9, 93. ed. Bip. It has been 3 Phil. Museum, 2, 348. 
doubted if Lucian be the au- 

c 5 



34 MESOPOTAMIAN ORIGIN OF JEWISH BELIEF. 

reference to a destruction of the human race by a 
flood. But the coincidence of the Babylonian, 
the Indian, the Mexican, and the Jewish accounts, 
can hardly be explained, without supposing a very 
high antiquity of the Asiatic tradition, an antiquity 
preceding our knowledge of any definite facts, in 
the history of these nations. That the scriptural 
narrative should have originated among the Jews 
in Palestine, and have been borrowed by other na- 
tions from them, is highly improbable : all the cir- 
cumstances bear the traces of a Mesopotamian 
origin. The ark is represented as being built of cy- 
press, the only wood fit for shipbuilding which this 
region afforded, 1 and covered with bitumen, which 
its asphaltic springs furnished in abundance. 2 
The dove was a sacred animal in S3^ria, probably 
wherever the goddess Mylitta was worshipped. 3 
Ararat, on w r hich the ark rests, is in the vicinity 
of the sources of the two great Mesopotamian 
rivers, and its summit the loftiest in Asia, west- 
ward of Caucasus. The plain of Shinar is the 
place in which the history of mankind re-com- 
mences, when the Deluge is over. 4 



1 Arrian. 9, 19. note of Broukhusius- 

2 Herod. 1, 179. 4 Gen. xi. 2. 
8 Tibull. 1, 7, 18, with the 



SPECULATION THE ORIGIN OF TRADITION. 35 

However high we may be warranted to carry up 
the existence of this tradition in Asia, 1 it will not 
necessarily follow that it was founded upon a real 
fact. A tradition is a popular belief, and must, 
like everything else, have a cause ; and for its 
special characters, a special cause. But that it is 
not, in itself, evidence of the truth of the fact 
which it assumes, may be seen in almost every 
case, in which the popular belief can be confronted 
with scientific, monumental and documentary evi- 
dence. There is hardly a remarkable remnant of 
antiquity to which it has not attached some false 
explanation. It matters not whether the tradi- 
tion have been written down and incorporated 
with history ; it gains no higher authority by this 
change ; the cause of its uncertainty is in its 
origin. The imaginations of the vulgar respect- 
ing historical events do not now find their way 
into national belief, because the cultivation of cri- 
ticism keeps imagination under control, or limits 
it to the uneducated ; but it was otherwise when 
no written or monumental history existed, and 



1 The only mode of avoid- after the Captivity. This is 

ing tins inference respecting the opinion of Von Bohlen and 

the high antiquity of the tra- others, but it appears to me 

dition, is to suppose that the in the highest degree impro- 

Book of Genesis was written bable. 



36 SPECULATION THE ORIGIN OF TRADITION. 

the faith of all classes was the same. There is 
abundant evidence that the past changes of the 
globe and the fate of the human race, as in- 
fluenced by them, have excited the imagination to 
speculate on their cause and circumstances, and 
that these speculations, assuming an historical 
form, have been received as matter of fact. The 
Mexicans believed in four great cycles, the first 
terminated by famine, the second by fire, from 
which only birds and two human beings escaped ; 
the third by storms of wind, which only the mon- 
keys escaped ; the fourth by water, in which all 
human beings save two were changed into fishes ; 
and to these cycles they ascribed an united dura- 
tion of eighteen thousand years. 1 It was a \6yog, 
a popular legend, among the Greeks, that Thes- 
saly had once been a lake, and that Neptune had 
opened a passage for the waters through the vale 
of Tempe. 2 The occupation of the banks of the 
rivers of this district by the Pelasgic tribes, which 
must have been subsequent to the opening of the 
gorge, is the earliest fact in Greek history, and the 
Xoyog itself no doubt originated in a very simple 
speculation. The sight of a narrow gorge, the 

1 Humboldt, Vue des Cor- 2 Herod. 7, 129. 
dilleras, 208. 



SPECULATION THE ORIGIN OF TRADITION. 37 

sole outlet to the waters of a whole district, natu- 
rally suggests the idea of its having once been 
closed, and as the necessary consequence, the 
inundation of the whole region which it now serves 
to drain. The inhabitants of Samothrace 1 had a 
similar traditionary belief, that the narrow strait 
by which the Euxine communicates with the Me- 
diterranean was once closed, and that its sudden 
disruption produced a deluge, which swept the sea- 
coast of Asia and buried some of their own towns. 
The fact of traces of the action of water at a 
higher level in ancient times on these shores is 
unquestionable ; under the name of raised beaches, 
such phenomena are familiar to geologists on many 
coasts : but that the tradition was produced by 
speculation on its cause, not by an obscure recol- 
lection of its occurrence, is also clear ; for it has 
been shown by physical proofs, that a discharge 
of the waters of the Euxine would not cause such 
a deluge as the tradition supposed. 2 It is not ne- 
cessary that philosophy should have been culti- 
vated among a people, to excite them to speculate 
upon the causes of remarkable natural appear- 
ances. The inhabitants of Polynesia have a tra- 

1 Diod. Sic. 5, 47. volutions du Globe, ed. 1826, 

3 Cuvier, Disc, sur les Re- p. 87. 



38 SPECULATION THE ORIGIN OF TRADITION. 

dition that the islands with which their ocean is 
studded are but the fragments of a continent 
which once existed. In Greece, where a similar 
state of things gave rise to a similar hypothesis, the 
continent of Lyctonia was supposed to have been 
split into the islands of the Mediterranean. 1 The 
inhabitants of the western parts of Cornwall have 
a tradition, as it is called, that the Scilly islands 
were once united to the mainland, by a tract now 
submerged. 2 In none of these instances does 
any historical fact appear to lie at the foundation 
of the tradition, even where, as in the case last 
mentioned, it is not in itself improbable. If the 
tradition of a Deluge is more widely spread than 
any of these, so are also the phenomena on which 
it is founded. No part of the world has yet been 
examined which does not bear marks of having 
been covered by water ; and though some of these 
facts have only been discovered by modern philo- 
sophical research, others must have been obvious 
from the first moment when man set his foot upon 
the reclaimed surface. The sand and shells which 
induced Herodotus 3 to believe that all Lower 

1 Orph. Argon. 1283. lar tradition respecting Jer- 

3 Lyell, Principles of Geo- sey, i. 77. 

logy, i. p. 282. See in In- 3 Her. 2, 12. 
glis, Channel Islands, a simi- 



SPECULATION THE ORIGIN OP TRADITION. 39 

Egypt, and even the hills above Memphis, had 
once been covered by the sea, had lain there for 
ages, before they drew his attention, and surely 
his was not the first reflecting mind that had spe- 
culated on their origin. 1 If few were capable of 
combining these and similar facts into a tradi- 
tion which should appear to explain them, many 
would be ready to receive it when framed, because 
the imagination and curiosity, even of the vulgar, 
is excited by such marks of unusual agencies in 
nature. We know not, indeed, how far the belief 
of the literary and sacerdotal class, from whom 
our accounts of the Deluge in various countries 
are derived, may have corresponded with the po- 
pular belief; they are usually found in sacred 
books, the knowledge of which, if not forbidden 
to the people, cannot have been much diffused 
among them. To allege that the time which in- 
tervened between the Deluge and the distinct 
existence of the nations among whom we find the 
traditional belief in it, was too short for the growth 
of a speculative explanation, assumes that we have 
a real chronology of this period. A similar as- 
sumption is involved in the objection that man- 

1 If Ovid may be trusted similar appearances, a theory 
(Met. 15, 259), Pythagoras not unlike that of modern 
had deduced from these and geology. 



40 SPECULATION THE ORIGIN OF TRADITION. 

kind were too rude and ignorant to occupy them- 
selves in such speculations. It is because we take 
for granted that a little more than two thousand 
years before Christ, mankind were reduced to a 
family of eight persons, that we attribute to times 
preceding history this incapacity for reflection. 
That traditions of the destruction of the human race 
by fire should be comparatively rare, is natural : 
the marks of the agency of this element, except in 
the case of active volcanoes, are much less obvious 
than those of water, and eluded the observation of 
naturalists, till a very recent period. 

The decisive proof, however, that the traditions 
of the Deluge are rather a very ancient hypothesis, 
than the reminiscence of a primaeval fact, is that 
they accord not with the phenomena, but with 
such a partial knowledge, and such conceptions 
of their cause, as prevailed in ancient times. 
They explain what is obvious, that water has once 
covered the summits of the present dry land, but 
not the equally certain, though less obvious fact, 
that long intervals of time and a great variety of 
circumstances must have existed. This want of 
conformity concludes much more strongly against 
an historical tradition, than a general and vague 
conformity in favour of it. 



DESTRUCTION OF THE HUMAN RACE. 41 

If from these marks of the action of water on the 
earth, the notion of a Deluge arose, it would not 
only include, as a necessary consequence, the de- 
struction of all living things, but also the guilt of 
the race which thus violently perished. No prin- 
ciple appears more universally to pervade the 
legends of early times, than that great calamities 
implied great guilt. At Mavalipuram, on the 
coast of Coromandel, the remains of several an- 
cient temples and other buildings, now close to the 
sea, suggested the idea that a splendid city had been 
buried under the waters. Such a calamity must 
have been inflicted by the gods as a punishment for 
some enormous crime, and this was found in the im- 
piety of the tyrannical king, the great Bali, who had 
been outwitted by Vischnu and condemned to hell. 
According to another account the gods destroyed it, 
because its magnificence rivalled that of the celestial 
courts. 1 It was on account of the wickedness of the 
Atlantians, that Jupiter submerged their island and 
drowned the whole race. 2 A similar tale is related 
of an island near China, the impious inhabitants of 
which thus perished, while their righteous king 



1 Asiat. Res. 2. p. 18. Sou- 2 Plato, Tim. iii. 25. Comp. 
they's Kehama, xv. with Critias, ad fin. iii. 109. 



42 DESTRUCTION OF THE HUMAN RACE. 

escaped. 1 The remains of buildings, or rocks 
which fancy has converted into such, seen through 
the transparent waters near the margin of lakes, 
have very generally given rise to legends of the 
destruction of towns for the wickedness of their 
inhabitants. 2 Dr. Robinson, in his Travels in Pales- 
tine, (2. 589,) mentions a tradition that a city had 
once stood in the desert between Petra and He- 
bron, the people of which had perished for their 
vices, and been converted into stone. Seetzen, who 
went to the spot, found no traces of ruins, but a 
number of stony concretions resembling in form 
and size the human head. They had been igno- 
rantly supposed to be petrified heads, and a legend 
framed to account for their owners suffering so ter- 
rible a fate. 3 The old heroic families of Greece had 
become, or were supposed to have become, extinct; 
and hence mythology is full of tales of the crimes, by 
which they had brought on themselves the vengeance 
of the gods. Troy had perished for the perjury of 
Laomedon ; the Pelopidse, for the crimes of Atreus 



1 Faber, Pagan Idolatry, ing Berigonium in Argyle- 
2. 180. quoting Ksempfer's shire. The vitrified walls 
Japan. were supposed to bear marks 

2 Faber, u. s. p. 176. of destruction by lightning, 

3 In the Transactions of Roy. and this was attributed to the 
Soc. Lit. 2, 251, is an account wickedness of the inhabi- 
of a similar tradition respect- tants. 



CHRONOLOGY OF GENESIS. 43 

and Tantalus ; the royal line of Thebes, for those of 
Laius and GEdipus; the Phlegyse, for their sacrile- 
gious invasion of the temple of Delphi. We con- 
fine ourselves to historical argument, or we might 
reasonably inquire whether, when God is said to 
repent of having made mankind, and to determine 
to destroy them for their wickedness, we really 
hear the purposes and motives of the Divine Being 
declared by himself, or man's imperfect notions, 
clothed in his own anthropomorphic language. 

But the question whether the belief in the ex- 
istence of a Deluge has originated in speculation, 
or the preserved remembrance of a fact, can hardly 
be decided without adverting to chronology. If 
an authentic chronology connected this event with 
times and persons unquestionably historical, by an 
interval so short, that tradition might preserve 
the knowledge of a fact, the presumption would be 
that it had been so preserved. We must, there- 
fore, inquire whether we have any chronology on 
which we can rely. No one but that which is 
contained in the book of Genesis, has even the 
appearance of authenticity; others betray them- 
selves at once as the work of invention, by the 
exaggeration of their numbers or the mythical 
circumstances interwoven in them. There is, 



44 HEBREW AND SEPTUAGINT CHRONOLOGY. 

however, an uncertainty in regard to the biblical 
text, in all those passages from which we derive 
the chronology, both of the period between the 
Creation and the Deluge, and the Deluge and the 
Birth of Abraham. Hence arise two questions, 
which must be carefully kept distinct— what is the 
true reading of the biblical text, and what cer- 
tainty belongs to the chronology of the primaeval 
times. 

There are three principal sources, from which 
the true text may be recovered ; the original He- 
brew, the Septuagint version, and the Samaritan 
copy of the Pentateuch, of which the language is 
Hebrew, but the text varies considerably from the 
Jewish copy, not only in the passages in question, 
but throughout the five books of Moses. The 
chronology is not reckoned backward or forward, 
from the Creation or the Deluge, but is deduced 
from the lives and generations of the Patriarchs, 
as recorded in the history. According to the He- 
brew text, 1656 years intervened between the 
Creation and the Deluge ; according to the Sama- 
ritan, 1307; according to the Septuagint, 2262; 
from the Deluge to the Call of Abraham, is, ac- 
cording to the Hebrew, 427 years ; according to 
the Samaritan, 1077; according to the Septuagint, 



HEBREW AND SEPTUAGINT CHRONOLOGY. 45 

1207; so that between the Creation and the 
Call of Abraham, there elapsed, according to the 
Hebrew, 2083 ; according to the Septuagint, 3469 
years; making a difference of 1386 years. 1 The 
Samaritan has found few advocates, but many 
learned men have preferred the Septuagint to the 
Hebrew, induced by the inconvenient narrowness 
of the limits into which the Hebrew chronology 
compresses the history of the world after the Flood. 2 
A critical question, however, must be decided 
wholly on critical grounds, and unless some reason 
can be given for suspecting the integrity of the 
Hebrew text, it claims that superior authority 
which naturally belongs to an original, above a 
version. A mere discrepancy in numbers, the 
most easily corrupted of all the contents of ancient 
MSS., is not in itself a reason for suspecting bad 
faith on either side : but in this instance it is of 
such a kind, as accidental corruption cannot ex- 
plain. The variation is systematic. The Sep- 
tuagint regularly adds 100 to the age of the father 
at the time of the birth of his eldest son, and as 



* l See the different reckon- pret. eorumque Chronologia 

ings in Anc. Univ. Hist, vol.i. Dissertatio. Jackson's Chro- 

p. 142—148, 252—258. nological Antiquities, 3 vols. 

2 Isaac Vossius de Antiqui- 4to. Hale's New Analysis of 

tate Mundi. Id. De 70. Inter- Chronology, 3 vols. 4to. 



46 HEBREW AND SEPTUAGINT CHRONOLOGY. 

regularly takes 100 from the length, of his life, 
after that event. It has besides inserted, between 
Arphaxad and Salah, a second Cainan, to whom 
130 years are attributed. These variations show, 
that the text has been tampered with, and either 
the Jews have shortened, or the Septuagint has 
lengthened, all the genealogies. 

That the reading of the Hebrew text was the 
same in the age of the preaching of Christianity 
as now, is fairly presumed from its correspondence 
with the Chaldee paraphrase of Onkelos, made in 
order that the Jews, who had lost the knowledge 
of the pure Hebrew, might understand the reading 
of the law. His age is uncertain/ but the fidelity 
of his version, the absence of all fabulous addi- 
tions, and the purity of his Chaldee idiom, confirm 
the accounts of the Jewish writers, who place him 
at the latest in the reign of Hadrian. From this 
time to the age of St. Jerome, the latter part of 
the 4th century after Christ, we find no positive 
statement, in any Jewish or Christian writer, on 
this subject ; but the old Syriac version (Peschito), 
which must have been made in this interval, 
agrees with the Hebrew text. St. Jerome, being 
well skilled in Hebrew, detected and notices 2 the 

1 Eichhorn, Einl. i. § 221. 2. 2 In Genes, op. 3, 320. 



HEBREW AND SEPTUAGINT CHRONOLOGY. 47 

discrepancy ; but, in his own revision of the old 
Latin version, which followed the Septuagint, and 
had been made from it, adheres to the Hebrew. 
If the Jews, after the preaching of the Gospel, had 
altered their own text, the copies of the Hebrew 
would probably have varied among themselves in 
the age of Jerome, or at least some memorial must 
have existed of so daring a fraud, and the learned 
father could not have been ignorant of it. The 
Hexapla of Origen, lost to us, were extant in his 
day, and would have informed him, had such a 
discrepancy existed a century and half earlier. 
Eusebius, in his Chronicon, notices the difference, 
but brings no charge of corruption against the 
Hebrew text. In Chron. Can., p. 87, ed. Seal., he 
is evidently speaking of chronological discrepancy, 
in times subsequent to the birth of Jacob. The 
complaints of such writers as Justin Martyr and 
Epiphanius, that the Jews had corrupted their 
scriptures, in order to take away from the Chris- 
tians the arguments in defence of their faith, 
would under any circumstances deserve little re- 
gard, as they were ignorant of Hebrew. But they 
never charge them specifically with shortening 
the patriarchal chronologies ; they had in view 
passages in the Psalms and Prophets, which they 



48 CHARGE OF CORRUPTION AGAINST THE JEWS. 

thought the Jews had corrupted ; and even as to 
these, their charge related not to the Hebrew, but 
to the copies of the Septuagint, which was com- 
monly read in the synagogues of the Hellenizing 
Jews, instead of the Hebrew or Chaldee. Of the 
falsehood of the imputation against the Jews, of 
corrupting the scriptures, we can judge for our- 
selves; the original text has come to us through their 
hands, and not a single passage has been altered, 
which was adduced by Christ and his Apostles as a 
proof of the divine origin of the Gospel. Aquila 
made a new version of the Old Testament into 
Greek, probably with a view to take from the 
Christians some of the arguments which they de- 
rived from the Septuagint ; not, however, by any 
corruption of the text, but a more literal rendering 
of the Hebrew. The utmost that can be alleged 
with truth, is, that the Jews point some words 
differently, to evade the arguments of the Chris- 
tians. I speak not of particular MSS., but the 
general testimony of the Hebrew text. 

The direct evidence on which they have been 
charged with corrupting the genealogies is very 
slight. 

Kennicott (Diss. Gen. § 83) quotes a passage 
attributed to Ephrem Syrus, about a.d. 350, from 



CHARGE OF CORRUPTION AGAINST THE JEWS. 49 

an Arabic Catena (MS.) in the Bodleian, (Hunt. 
84,) in which it is asserted that the Jews have 
taken 100 years from the lives of Adam, Seth, 
Enosh, Cainan, Mahaleel and Enoch, in all 600 
years, " ut manifestationem Messise celarent, ne 
libri eorum eos reprehenderent de Messise adventn, 
apparituri post annos 5500, ut liberet hominem." 
The MS. is of the year 1577, and I have not been 
able to obtain any more precise information as to 
the evidence on which this passage is attributed 
to Ephrem, or the work from which it is quoted. 
We have a Commentary of Ephrem in the Syriac, 
on the Book of Genesis, in which he follows the 
Hebrew reckoning, without intimating any diver- 
sity in the Greek. " In celeberrima annorum 
supputatione, ab orbe condito usque ad diluvium, 
Hebraicum fontem sequitur Ephrsemus, et de 
Grsecse lectionis diversitate ne verbum quidem fa- 
cit." Assemann, Bibl. Orient, t. i. p. 65, quoted 
by Bruns ad Kennicott, § 83. But even if Ephrem 
really had asserted that the Jews had corrupted 
the text, we must not too hastily conclude that he 
possessed anything like a proof of it. It would 
seem to a zealous partizan the most natural way of 
accounting for the difference. The Archbishop of 



50 CHARGE OF CORRUPTION AGAINST THE JEWS. 

Goa 1 directed the Indian Christians to restore to 
their copies of the Syriac New Testament, the text 
of the Heavenly Witnesses, " because it had been 
suppressed by impiety." What value would any 
critic attach to this assertion ? 

Jacobus Edessenus, who nourished about the 
year 700, makes the charge against the Jews, of 
having taken 100 years from the age of Adam and 
the other Patriarchs ; but instead of saying, as 
Kennicott represents, that he had found some He- 
brew copies which agreed with the Septuagint, 
what he really says is, that he had found the age 
of Adam, at the birth of Seth, given at 230 years, 
" in some accurate Hebrew histories ;" on which 
Bruns observes, " Nullus dubito quin ' Hebraicse 
historian satis accurate/ valde similes fuerint Tar- 
gumin istorum, quse hodie nomine Hierosolymitani 
et Jonathan Ben Uzziel circumferuntur." This 
he confirms from other passages. The Tar gum of 
Jonathan Ben Uzziel was written, according to 
Bruns, in the 6th century, at least not later. 

The expectation of the Jews, according to the 
Talmud, (Anc. Un. Hist. 3, 39,) was that the Mes- 
siah should come when the Law had endured 2000 
1 Porson, Letters to Travis, p. 173. 



MOTIVES FOR THE CORRUPTION OF THE GREEK. 51 

years. According to the Septuagint Chronology, 
the birth of Christ fell in the year of the world 
5507, but as nothing is said in Scripture as to the 
interval between this event and the Creation, it 
does not appear why the Jews should corrupt 
the text of Genesis, " ut manifestationem Messise 
celarent." 

We can see no motive then which should induce 
the Jews systematically to shorten their own 
chronology by laying violent hands upon their 
scriptures; but when we advert to the circum- 
stances under which the Septuagint translation 
was made, we see obvious reasons why the Jews 
of Alexandria should have wished to lengthen it. 
They must have known that the Egyptians claimed 
an antiquity for their nation and empire, with 
which the short chronology of the Hebrew Scrip- 
tures was quite irreconcileable. Manetho pub- 
lished his Dynasties in the reign of Ptolemy Phila- 
delphus ; and the first version of the Pentateuch 
was made in the early part of the same reign. 
But Manetho did not first reveal to the Egyptians 
the fact of the high antiquity of their history : we 
know from Herodotus 1 and Plato, that in their 
times the foundation of the monarchy was carried 
1 Herod, ii. 77. 
d2 



52 MOTIVES FOR THE CORRUPTION OF THE GREEK. 

back for many thousand years. To have placed 
before the eyes of this people, and of the Greeks, 
who had adopted their views, a chronology so brief 
as that of the Hebrew text, would have been a 
mortifying acknowledgment of inferiority. There 
was little danger that the liberty taken by the 
translators should be detected, in an age when 
few possessed the power of comparing their labour 
with the original. They might not be conscious 
of any dishonest purpose ; they might believe that 
a chronology at variance with that of the nation 
most celebrated for historical knowledge, could 
not be correct. But even if we must condemn 
it as a sacrifice of truth to national vanity, there 
is nothing in the character of the Alexandrian 
Jews to raise them above such a suspicion. 
On the contrary, they were adepts in literary 
forgery, most of the Apocryphal books are with 
reason attributed to them, and the story of the 
origin of the Septuagint is an admitted fable. 

The Samaritan copy of the Pentateuch agrees 
with the Hebrew in regard to the first five gene- 
rations from Adam, but varies in the age attributed 
to Jared, Methuselah and Lamech, at the births 
of their respective eldest sons. But in the time 
of St. Jerome, the Hebrew and the Samaritan 



CHRONOLOGY OF THE SAMARITAN. 53 

agreed in regard to the two last ; 1 and, therefore, 
the reading of our present copies of the Samaritan 
must have originated or superseded the other since 
the 4th century. In the chronology of the post- 
diluvian Patriarchs, the Samaritan omits Cainan, 
and follows a different reckoning as to the time 
which each patriarch survived the birth of his 
son, but in regard to the father's age, at the 
time when the son was born, it corresponds 
with the Septuagint. It is well known that in 
a multitude of passages of the Pentateuch, the 
Septuagint and the Samaritan agree, against 
the Hebrew, a phenomenon in respect to the 
origin of which biblical critics are by no means 
yet agreed. But the great majority of them bear 
so strongly the marks of being arbitrary correc- 
tions, designed to supply supposed deficiencies, or 
to rectify supposed mistakes of the Hebrew, that 
no reliance can be placed on those readings which 
have the united authority of both of these copies, 
where any probable motive to an arbitrary change 
can be suggested. The Hellenizing Jews of Alex-- 
andria, and the Samaritans who were established 
there, were probably not in such hostile relations 

1 Hieron. Qusest. in Gen. v. Chron. Mos. ante Diluvium, 
3, 4, quoted by Michaelis de p. 131. 



54 CHRONOLOGY OF JOSEPHUS. 

to each other as in Palestine, and their respective 
copies of the Pentateuch may have been corrected 
to bring them into harmony. 

That the change was made in the chronology at 
the time of the translation appears probable, from 
its having been adopted by some writers who lived 
in the interval between Ptolemy Philadelphus and 
Josephus, e. g. Demetrius and Eupolemus. 1 No 
one can read the extracts from these writers, and 
compare them with the manner in which the real 
heathens, Diodorus, for example, and Tacitus, speak 
of the Jews, without perceiving that they are Jews 
in disguise. This, however, is of no importance 
to our present argument, since whether heathens 
or Alexandrian Jews, they would of course employ 
the Greek translation. Josephus, as he adopts 
the chronology of the Septuagint, (only omitting 
the second Cainan, and giving, with the Hebrew, 
29 instead of 79 years to Nahor at the birth of 
Terah,) may be regarded as evidence that the 
Greek text was in his days nearly what it is at pre- 
sent. But we cannot infer from his adoption of it, 
either that there was then no difference between 
the Hebrew and the Septuagint, or that on critical 
grounds he gave the preference to the latter. 
1 Euseb. Prsep. Ev. 9, 17. 21. 29. 30. 



CHARACTER OF JOSEPHUS. 55 

That he was not wholly ignorant of Hebrew is 
evident ; bnt whether he understood it so as to 
read it fluently — above all, whether he wrote from 
the Hebrew or the Greek — are questions which 
learned men have answered differently. 1 His own 
positive assertion, Ant. x. 6, 6, that he only trans- 
lated the books of the Hebrews, would have had 
great weight, had he not accompanied it by the 
declaration, that he had neither added nor taken 
away anything — whereas it is a notorious fact 
that he has used great liberties both in adding 
and suppressing. 2 But whether Josephus could 
or could not read Hebrew so readily as to detect 
a difference if it existed between the two texts, it 
is little likely that he should have proclaimed it. 
He wrote, not for his own countrymen, but for 
heathen nations, and his ill-judging patriotism or 
vanity induced him to soften down and pare away 
from the authentic records whatever was likely to 
offend or revolt them. Thus in the history of the 
Deluge he suppresses the fact, that the Scriptures 
represent it as destroying all but the family of 



1 Among recent scholars, ship of Josephus. Eichhorn, 

Ernesti Exerc. Flav. Opusc. A.T. 1. 349 note, against it. 
364, and Michaelis Synt. 2 He speaks more vaguely, 

Comm. 165, have decided in Proem. Ant. i. 2. 
favour of the Hebrew scholar- 



56 THE HEBREW TEXT AUTHENTIC. 

Noah. Ant. i. 141. What system of Chronology 
warranted his assertion, Ant. Proem, i. 3, that 
Moses was born 2000 years before his own time ? 
Writing in such a spirit of compromise, and with 
so little regard to truth, is it likely that he would 
acknowledge, out of respect for the Hebrew verity, 
that the original records of his nation contained a 
chronology which the heathens would regard as 
false, from its inconsistency with their own ? 

We must then acquiesce in the conclusion, that 
the Hebrew copies represent the original and 
authentic text of the book of Genesis. We are not 
at liberty, in a question purely critical, to give 
weight to arguments of any other kind than those 
by which the genuineness of readings in ancient 
authors is decided. On historical grounds, very 
formidable objections present themselves to the 
Hebrew chronology. Without going beyond the 
history itself, it must appear incredible, that a 
little more than 400 years after the world was 
dispeopled by the Flood, Abraham should have 
found a Pharaoh reigning over the monarchy of 
Egypt, and that the East, as far as its condition is 
incidentally disclosed to us, should present no 
trace of recent desolation, but is already occupied 
and divided into communities, wherever the patri- 



DIFFICULTIES OF THE HEBREW CHRONOLOGY. 57 

arch moves. The difficulties are still greater when 
the Mosaic chronology is applied as a measure to 
profane history. Half a century since, when Ma- 
netho passed for an impostor, and Egyptian his- 
tory was lengthened or shortened, to suit an 
hypothesis, it was supposed that the thousand 
years, gained by the substitution of the Greek for 
the Hebrew numbers, gave ample time for all the 
events of post-diluvian history, and this is still 
the refuge of many writers ; but this ground is 
no longer tenable. The Egyptian monuments and 
records carry us to the beginning . of the third 
millennium before the birth of Christ: and the 
earliest glimpse we gain of the condition of man- 
kind in this country, exhibits them as already far 
advanced in civilization, and bearing no marks of 
so recent an origin from a single family as even 
the Septuagint chronology supposes. India, China, 
Assyria, though their histories are not established 
on evidence as irrefragable as that of Egypt, give 
similar testimony to the high antiquity of civiliza- 
tion, a condition of society which presupposes a 
long period of progressive culture. 

It is not, however, in these difficulties alone that 
we find reason for doubting whether the genealogies 
of the Book of Genesis, taken either according to 
d5 



58 PATRIARCHAL GENEALOGIES NOT HISTORICAL. 

the Hebrew or the Septuagint, furnish us with a real 
chronology and history. The chain which extends 
from Adam to Abraham is composed of persons 
whose life is said to have exceeded, sometimes in a 
tenfold degree, the present average of human life. 
If we build a chronology on this, we fall again 
into the fallacy of assuming the supernatural as 
the proof of the historical. Such a prolongation 
of human life is a perpetual miracle. It is con- 
trary to all analogy that living beings, the same in 
species, should differ from each other in length of 
life by several centuries. When a naturalist col- 
lects the proofs of identity of species, he does 
not fail to include conformity in the duration of 
life. Beings whose lives extended to nearly 1000 
years must have been physically, morally and 
intellectually different from ourselves, whose aver- 
age does not exceed three score years and ten. 
They cannot, therefore, have been our progenitors. 
If, to avoid this difficulty, we suppose that year 
meant some other length of time than twelve 
months in this part of the history, we cut ourselves 
off from all possibility of establishing a chrono- 
logy, the value of its unit being uncertain. If we 
say that there is some error in the reckoning, we 
undermine the authority of a document, into 



CHRONOLOGY INFLUENCED BY POPULAR NOTIONS. 59 

which we admit that so grave an error can have 
crept. 

We have already seen that the accounts of the 
Creation and the subsequent history of the world, 
have come down to us in the form of popular tra- 
dition, and that consequently we are not to expect 
in them that accuracy which belongs to a history 
founded on documentary and monumental evi- 
dence. The early chronology of all nations is 
equally characterized by the influence of popular 
conceptions. With a feeling akin to the pride of 
family, they endeavour to deduce their own lineage 
in direct descent from the jwotoplastce of the hu- 
man race. Thus the Hindus attribute the origin 
of their institutions and race to Menu, whose 
name is equivalent to man. The Germans made 
Tuisto (Teutsch) and his son Mannus to be the 
origin and founders of their nation. The Hebrew 
language has two names for man, Adam DTK, and 
Enosh t£0&; and accordingly we have a double 
genealogy of Lamech in Genesis, one tracing him 
through Methuselah, Enoch, Jared, Mahaleel, and 
Cainan to Enos ; the other through Methusael, Me- 
hujael, Irad, Enoch and Cain to Adam. Ch. iv. 17 ; 
v. 9—27. They are virtually the same in their steps, 
though the orthography is a little varied, and Enoch 
is transposed. To give primaeval antiquity to their 



60 CHRONOLOGY INFLUENCED BY POPULAR NOTIONS. 

language and institutions, and connect themselves 
with the origin of all things, by an unbroken chain 
of chronology, has been an object of ambition to 
ancient nations ; but they have attained this ob- 
ject in different ways. If familiar with the powers 
of numbers and the cycles of astronomy, as the 
Chinese, Indians, Egyptians and Mexicans, and 
surrounded by monuments of hoary antiquity, they 
compute their own age by thousands and tens of 
thousands of years, extending beyond all proba- 
bility the commencement of their history. If, on 
the contrary, like the Jews, they have no great mo- 
numents of former days, no scientific culture, and 
few and brief historical traditions, they bring down 
the sera of creation as near as possible to their 
own times and the shorter series of numbers 
with which they are familiar. A chronology 
which rests only on genealogy, even supposing it 
to be historical, is especially liable to arbitrary 
contraction; as the whole descent becomes bur- 
densome to the memory, steps are left out, and an 
artificial compactness is given to the table, some- 
times by insertion, but more frequently by omis- 
sion. 1 Oriental history is wont to shorten genealo- 
gical registers in order to help the memory, and 

1 Monumenta antiquissima horn, § 7, p. 18. 
Historise Arabum ed. Eich- 



UNCERTAINTY OF GENEALOGIES. 61 

make the great grandfather the immediate parent 
of the great grandson. This is the practice of the 
Arabs, and probably also of the Jews. Noah, 
Gen. v., is made the tenth in descent from Adam ; 
Abraham, Gen. xi., the tenth from Shem. So in 
the genealogy in Matthew, the three periods from 
Abraham to David, from David to the Captivity, 
and from the Captivity to Christ, are made each 
to comprise fourteen generations. The Greek 
heroic genealogies ascend by only five, six or 
seven generations from the war of Troy to the 
commencement of history. 1 Were we to adopt 
either the extended or the contracted scale as the 
authoritative standard, by which all others are to 
be corrected, we should involve ourselves in end- 
less difficulties, and must either fill out vast spaces 
with imaginary dynasties, or arbitrarily alter the 
denominations of time, and reckon years as days, 
or compress the events of centuries into years. 

No evidence, therefore, remains, by which we 
can fix the interval which elapsed between the 

1 Commonly only four, fourth generation beyond the 

Miiller, Orchomenos und die Trojan war. The royal fa- 

Minyer, p. 137. "Homer's mily of Troy alone forms the 

genealogies of his heroes all exception; Jupiter was an- 

end in a god, a river, or some cestor in the seventh degree 

unaccountable personage, in to Hector." — Mitf. Hist, of 

the second, third, or at most Greece, i. 249. 



62 NO CHRONOLOGY OF PRIMEVAL TIMES. 

origin of the human race and the commencement 
of the special history of each nation. They must be 
allowed to carry out their own chronology as far, 
but no farther, into this obscure region, as they 
can produce evidence to justify their claim. This 
evidence must be, not popular tradition, but docu- 
ments or monuments ; going upward from what is 
connected, known, and fixed by proximity to the 
historical times of other nations, to the more 
broken and doubtful succession of the earliest 
events. We shall thus be assured that we are 
dealing with facts, and not with hypotheses, con- 
secrated by antiquity and national belief, and at 
the same time escape the risk of rejecting true 
historical evidence, because it cannot be reconciled 
with an arbitrary standard of credibility. 

The consequence of the method which has been 
commonly adopted, of making the Jewish chrono- 
logy the bed of Procrustes, to which every other 
must conform its length, has been, that credence 
has been refused to histories, such as that of 
Egypt, resting upon unquestionable documents; 
and we have voluntarily deprived ourselves of at 
least a thousand years, which had been redeemed 
for us from the darkness of ante-historic times. 

We may seem thus to be brought to the con- 



NO MATERIALS FOR PRIMEVAL HISTORY. 63 

elusion, that there is not, and cannot be, such a 
thing as primaeval history ; and this is true, in the 
sense in which primeval history is commonly un- 
derstood. The historian has not the same re- 
sources as the geologist. He, establishing his own 
conclusions upon the evidence of his own science, 
has attained to more than negative results, and 
has brought to light an order of succession in the 
formation of the strata of the earth, and the pro- 
duction of vegetables and animals, to which 
nothing is wanting, to bring it within the desig- 
nation of history, except some measure of time. 
But the annals of man are not written in the im- 
perishable records of nature. He must be his own 
historian. To feel conscious of the relation in 
which he stands to the past and the future ; to 
devise the means of perpetuating thoughts and 
events for the instruction of posterity, he must 
have passed the first stages of social improvement. 
And, as Time is ever at work to counteract his 
efforts, crumbling the papyrus and mouldering 
the inscribed stone, much of his earliest history 
may have perished from the frailty of the material 
on which it was recorded. 

In denying an historical character to the tradi- 
tions out of which so many nations have consti- 



64 MYTHIC FICTION. 

tuted for themselves a primaeval history, we may 
seem to indulge a spirit of arbitrary and wanton 
scepticism. To justify us in refusing to them the 
character even of materials for history, we must 
direct attention to the wide influence of mythic 
fiction, in producing what popular belief has ac- 
cepted as a true narrative of facts. 

Though we cannot in any country, except 
those whose civilization is most recent, fix the 
exact sera of the use of writing, we can per- 
ceive everywhere a period when it was either 
unknown, or so little used for historical pur- 
poses, that fancy had a free range, in ascribing 
to it what events it pleased. Hence the ante-his- 
toric period of a nation is also the mythic. As 
applied to the legends of early times, this word 
must be distinguished from the fables which have 
been devised for the illustration of the maxims of 
prudence and morality, from the ornaments which 
poetic imagination and taste bestow on the narra- 
tive of facts, by the introduction of supernatural 
agency, and from the fictions and exaggerations 
which superstition and credulity introduce into 
the accounts of even recent and altogether histo- 
rical events. The mythi, which occupy the earliest 
pages of the history of the principal countries of 



MYTHIC FICTION. 65 

the ancient world, differ by one remarkable cha- 
racter from those which we meet with even in his- 
toric times ; the latter are commonly, though not 
always, historical in their ground- work; the 
former relate to a period of which, by supposition, 
no history had been preserved, and may, therefore, 
be wholly the work of imagination. Imagination 
itself, however, has its laws ; it requires a motive 
for its exertion, and the definite form which its 
productions assume, implies a cause which has 
given them this shape, rather than any other. 
Some emotion usually awakens the activity of this 
faculty ; curiosity, national pride and patriotism, 
religious feeling ; and as these states of mind are 
not solitary, but pervade many bosoms, and even 
affect a whole nation, many minds are ready to 
receive the mythic legends with sympathy and 
faith, and to co-operate in their production. What 
gives its definite form to the legend thus created 
is something present to the senses, or permanent 
in the feelings of those who produce or receive it. 
But however much, by its vividness or its specialty, 
it may put on the appearance of reality, it is still 
essentially imaginative. The problem to be solved 
is one of fact ; the solution, while it appears to be 
historical^ may contain no fact at all. 



66 FICTION OF A GOLDEN AGE. 

The error which has so extensively prevailed in 
regard to these legends, and has procured them 
credit, as containing the first chapters of primaeval 
and national history, is the opinion that they were 
produced in or near the age to which they refer, an 
assumption which cannot be proved in regard to 
any, and may be disproved of the greater number. 

1. The mind acquiesces most reluctantly in the 
imperfection or interruption of its knowledge of 
the past, and whatever in the objects or institu- 
tions which surround it, or of which it has learnt 
the existence from history, is of sufficient import- 
ance to excite emotions of wonder and curiosity, 
is accounted for by mythic invention. We have 
seen this with certainty in the case of the cosmo- 
gonies of ancient nations, with probability in their 
supposed traditions of the flood. The belief in a 
golden age, which we find extensively prevalent, 
appears, like these, to owe its origin to causes not 
confined to any one nation, but inherent in human 
nature, and, therefore, very generally producing 
similar effects. It is the misery of the age of iron, 
an age which includes the earliest period of history 
as truly as our own, which has created the age of 
gold. The severity of toil, the difficulty of sub- 
sistence, the unequal distribution of wealth, the 



FICTION OF A GOLDEN AGE. 67 

abuse of power, the injustice of man towards man, 
and the whole train of evils which flow from 
the physical condition of humanity and its moral 
defects, have turned imagination towards a 
time, when labour was not exacted, because the 
earth yielded abundance for man's simple wants, 
and the abuse of civilization had not yet awakened 
artificial desires ; when laws were not needed be- 
cause crimes were unknown; when everything be- 
longed alike to all, and the gods lived in friendly 
society with men. This belief has little in com- 
mon with the scriptural account of the original 
condition and subsequent fall of man ; the change 
there described is individual and internal, and he 
is not represented as existing in a social state, with- 
out misery or crime. It is at once too widely 
diffused in its essence, and too distinctly national 
in its details, to have originated in one spot. The 
time at which this condition of peace and virtue 
is supposed to have existed, is separated by so 
wide a chasm from everything historical, that we 
cannot believe that any remembrance of it should 
have been handed down, and in every country is 
different ; we may add, that it is founded upon a 
false assumption, that a state of inactivity, the 
result of spontaneous abundance, is more favour- 



68 FICTION OF HAPPY RACES OF MEN. 

able to human virtue and happiness, than the ob- 
ligation to labour. We seek the source of this 
belief, therefore, in the mind of man himself, 
which endeavours to obtain relief from actual suf- 
fering, in the contemplation of a state in which it 
was unknown. As imagination passes the bounds 
of all historic time to create such a condition, so 
it places beyond the bounds of geographical know- 
ledge, races of men superior in health, longevity 
and virtue, to the inhabitants of the known parts 
of the globe. Such were the Atlantians, the Hy- 
perboreans, the Ethiopians. These fictions are 
beautiful ; they prove that imagination has been 
benevolently given to man, as an antagonist power 
to the oppressive realities of social life, and that 
he feels within himself the consciousness of good, 
which, could it be extricated from the evil with 
which it is encumbered, would render him worthy 
to be the associate of divine natures. But we 
must not seek for the original of these pictures in 
history or in geography. 

2. The nations which have admitted a plurality 
of gods, have had a theogony as well as a cosmo- 
gony, the events of which belong to their mythic 
age. The connection which they may appear to 
have with local and historical circumstances is 



THEOGONY AND HEROIC HISTORY. 69 

evidently factitious ; for as the personages are ima- 
ginary, the events cannot be real. In the more 
refined and spiritual systems of polytheism, the 
generation of the gods is little more than a symbo- 
lical expression ; in the more anthropomorphic, it 
assumes a nearer resemblance to historic fact, and 
is adorned with circumstances, having their pro- 
totype in human relations. Even in the very an- 
thropomorphic system of the Greeks, there is a 
portion which at once discloses its merely symbo- 
lical character. "When it is said that Ouranos 
(Heaven) first ruled over the whole world ; that he 
married Ghe (the Earth), and that their offspring 
were the hundred-handed giants ; or that Oceanos 
was the progeny of the same parents; or that 
Kronos (Time) devoured a long succession of his 
own offspring, — it is evident that nothing real is 
meant to be described, and that we have merely a 
philosophical speculation in a transparent allego- 
rical garb. These personages, indeed, though 
called gods, were hardly objects of general national 
belief or of divine rites. But the real gods of 
popular belief, being more frequently presented 
to the eye under the human form, having their 
local abodes on earth, and being brought into ma- 
nifold relations with actual life, were regarded by 



70 THEOGONY AND HEROIC HISTORY. 

the majority of their worshippers as real persons, 
and their agency was freely intermingled with that 
of man, in a web of fiction which it is impossible 
to unravel, so as to separate the mythic from the 
historic threads. The course which has been 
commonly pursued, to reject all as fabulous which 
is supernatural, and admit all as true which is 
possible, is altogether arbitrary, because fiction 
may work with natural means, and within the 
limits of the laws of nature as well as beyond 
them. More than the possibility of a fact must 
be established, to authorize its reception as matter 
of history. The place which these personifications 
and abstractions hold in the Greek mythology, 
shows that we cannot even trust to it as an histo- 
rical deduction of the progress of theological be- 
lief. The real objects of the national faith in the 
earliest ages to which we can ascend, Jupiter and 
his kindred, appear as the latest in the order of 
theogony. But there is no reason to believe that 
the worship of another line of gods preceded that 
of the descendants of Saturn. On the contrary, 
Ouranos and his children appear to be entirely the 
result of later speculation, and to have been placed 
at the head of the theogony, in order to fill up the 
chasm and connect the existing deities with the 



CONTEST OF GOOD AND EVIL PRINCIPLES. 71 

origin of Heaven and Earth. The very forms of 
their names betray the late date of the mythos ; 
they are ordinary Greek ; while those of the 
descendants of Saturn, though also of Greek root, 
can be explained in general only from obsolete 
and dialectic forms. In regard to other mytho- 
logies, as the Indian and the Egyptian, in which 
deities of a more spiritual character appear, in the 
order of theogony, to precede those who come 
nearer to humanity in their form, their passions 
and their history, we may reasonably conclude 
that they result from later refinement. Such is 
the distinction between Braam and Brama, in the 
Hindu theology. 1 Their apparent spirituality is 
really their imperfect personification, itself the 
consequence of their not having been objects of 
popular belief, nor creations of the popular mind. 
3. The mythology of several ancient nations, 
represents the dominion of the gods as not having 
been established, without struggles with powerful 
enemies, by whom they even suffered partial and 
temporary defeat. The general idea which such 
mythi embody, is derived partly from the con- 
flicting forces which are still active in nature, and 
appear to have possessed even greater energy in 
1 Moor, Hindu Pantheon, p. 3. 



72 CONTEST OF GOOD AND EVIL PRINCIPLES. 

primaeval times, partly from the mixture of evil 
with good, which pervades nature, providence and 
human life. In the Greek mythology, in which a 
moral element seldom appears, the conflict of the 
gods with the Titans, denotes merely the slow and 
reluctant submission of the vast and turbulent 
powers of nature, to those laws by which the actual 
system is preserved in harmony and order. The 
giants, who endeavoured to storm heaven, and 
were buried in the Phlegraean fields, in the Palle- 
nian peninsula, or under Mount iEtna, represent 
specifically the violent disturbance which volcanic 
agency introduces. The Egyptian Typhon com- 
bines physical and moral evil ; so does the Ahri- 
man of the Zoroastrian mythology. The Hindus 
have no such distinct and single personification 
of the principle of evil ; but their preserving 
god Vischnu becomes incarnate at intervals, 
when either moral or physical evil is likely to 
predominate. These fictions show, not only that 
man has been universally conscious of the mixed 
influences to which he is subject, but also of the 
preponderance of the good. The Titans have been 
cast down and imprisoned in Tartarus ; Typhocus 
turns under the weight of iEtna, but cannot throw 
it off. Typhon has been vanquished by Horus, and 






RACES OF GIANTS. 73 

buried in the Serbonian bog. Ahriman still con- 
tinues the contest with Ormuzd, but the power of 
the evil principle has been already limited, and 
will be ultimately overthrown. 

The fiction of a race of giants, engaged in war- 
fare with the gods, is so remote from all historical 
probability, that its true nature is at once seen; 
but it may be thought that there is something of 
an historical foundation for the very prevalent 
belief, that a race, of stature, strength and longe- 
vity far surpassing that of later degenerate days, 
has once occupied the earth, and even left on it 
the traces of its existence in its mighty works. 
We by no means deny the possibility that such a 
race may have existed, but analogy does not 
favour the supposition, and the direct evidence 
will be found to be fallacious. We discover 
among fossil remains, those of animals congene- 
rous with such as now exist, far surpassing them 
in size, but seldom, if ever, identical with them in 
all other respects, except their size. Their species 
is different, and therefore analogy is against the 
conclusion that the human race has ever varied, 
except within the limits of existing varieties ; 
varieties which include Patagonians and Esqui- 
meaux. The supposed remains of gigantic human 

E 



74 MYTHIC FICTIONS. 

bones, which afford to popular credulity an argu- 
ment of their former existence, when examined, 
prove to be those of cetaceous animals, or ele- 
phants ; the traditions which ascribe great works 
to them are only proofs how completely the re- 
membrance of their real origin has been lost. 
Looking upward from the base of the Great Py- 
ramid, we might suppose it the work of giants ; 
but it is entered by passages, admitting with diffi- 
culty a man of the present size 5 and we find in the 
centre a sarcophagus about six feet long. The 
strength and stature of the men of past ages have 
been exaggerated, from the same cause as their 
happiness and their virtue, and each successive 
generation has regarded itself as holding a middle 
position between the highest and the lowest points 
of the scale. Two men of Homer's day could have 
lifted with difficulty the stones which the heroes 
of the Trojan War hurled at each other with ease. 1 
Virgil anticipated that the bones of those who fell 
in the Civil Wars, when disinterred by posterity, 
would be gazed at with wonder for their size. 2 

4. Religious rites, from their connection with 
the most solemn ideas which can occupy the 
human mind, their supposed influence on the 
1 II. E. 302. 2 Georg. 1, 497. 



ORIGIN OF RELIGIOUS RITES. 75 

happiness of those who perform them, and the 
high antiquity in which their origin is commonly 
lost, have powerfully excited imagination, and 
many mythic legends have been devised to explain 
their origin and circumstances. They have, no 
doubt, sometimes had an historic origin. For the 
Jewish Passover, we have a cause assigned in the 
deliverance from Egypt, an event belonging to an 
historic age ; and it is incredible that a whole na- 
tion should have been in error, in regard to a 
transaction which so deeply affected them. 1 But 
if we examine the majority of those legends which 
are connected with the foundations of temples, the 
institution of solemn rites and public festivities, 
we shall find that they have much more the air 
of being devised to explain certain peculiarities, 
which had excited wonder and curiosity, than of 
having been handed down, side by side with the 
practices themselves. At the temple of Papremis, 
in Egypt, dedicated to Mars, it was customary, on 
one evening of the year, that the votaries of the 
god should force an entrance for his shrine and 
statue into the sanctuary, and that the priests 

1 The circumstance men- the appointment of circumci- 

tioned in Gen. xxxii. 32, is a sion, (Gen. xvii. 9 ; Exod. iv. 

remarkable contrast to this. 24,) which was not an exclu- 

So are the various accounts of sively Jewish rite. 

E 2 



76 MYTHIC FICTIONS. 

should resist ; and lives were lost, as Herodotus 
relates/ in the sanguinary affray which ensued ; 
symbolical, as it should seem, of the warlike at- 
tributes of the god. The kpdg \6yog of the temple 
represented it as originating in the endeavour of 
Mars to force his way to an interview with his 
mother, and the resistance of the priests, to whom 
he was unknown. The Eleusinian festival ex- 
hibited a singular mixture of mournful rites with 
the most unbridled licentiousness of the tongue 
and gesture, not unnatural, as both death and life, 
joy and sorrow, the apparent destruction of the 
seed in winter and its germination in the spring, 
were symbolized in these mysteries. The sacred 
legend of the place referred the custom to the 
coarse pleasantries with which a woman had dissi- 
pated the grief of the goddess, when she had 
arrived at Eleusis, seeking her lost daughter. The 
Syrians abstained from fish, probably from dietetic 
motives, but their abstinence was explained by a 
legend of the conversion of their great goddess 
into a fish. 2 Such explanations, as they assume 
the existence of personages whom we know to be 

i Her. 2, 63. undas, Anguipedem alatis hu- 

2 Scilicet in piscem sese Cy- meris Typhona furentem. Ma- 

therea novavit, Quum Baby- nil. Astron. iv. 580. Comp. 

loniacas summersa profugit in Tzetz. Chil. 275. 



NATURAL PHENOMENA. 77 

fictitious, will not now be received as history ; but 
fiction, though it finds a clearer field in ages of 
which no history existed, avails itself also of the ob- 
scurity of periods within historical limits. The 
builder of the third pyramid, Mycerinus or Men- 
kare, is an historical personage, but his age was 
as obscure to the Greek interpreters and the 
Egyptians generally in the time of Herodotus, as 
if he had been wholly mythic. Hence a legend 
had been invented, to account for one of the cere- 
monies of the worship of Isis, and related as an 
historical anecdote of him and his daughter. 1 

5. Extraordinary appearances in nature excite 
wonder and curiosity; if they are of a transient kind, 
momentary supernatural agency is called in to ex- 
plain them ; if permanent, a mythic legend usually 
attaches itself to them. A fetid scum was occasion- 
ally thrown up on the shores of Sicily, which was 
explained as the consequence of the Sun's stabling 
his horses in those Western regions. 2 But the 
same legend had a more historic form; trans- 
ferred to the Peloponnesus, Augeas (avyh) the son 
of the Sun was substituted for the Sun himself, 
and the cleansing of the stable was deemed a la- 
bour worthy of Hercules. 3 The rocks of Sipylus 

* Herod. 2, 130. 2 Sen. Nat. Quest. 3, 26. 3 Apollod. 2, 5 



78 



MYTHIC FICTIONS. 



bore a fantastic resemblance to a weeping woman ; 
Niobe was said to have been converted into stone. 1 
A well in the Acropolis of Athens had an unseen 
communication with the sea, and furnished salt 
water ; it was supposed to have been produced by 
Neptune, who having* the epithet of Erechtheus, 
(or the shaker ',) it was also attributed to an ancient 
king of that name. 2 The river which ran by 
Byblos into the sea, assumed, in summer, the ap- 
pearance of being stained with blood, owing to a 
stratum of red earth, found in Libanus, which 
the winds, at that season, carried in large quan- 
tities into the stream ■ the legends of the country 
attributed the phenomenon to the wound of the 
god Adonis. 3 The habits or forms of animals, 
if they presented anything uncommon to excite 
the fancy, gave rise to mythic explanations. The 
tinge of red on the swallow's breast was explained 
as the bloody trace of the murder of Itys ; 4 as the 
Mahometans explain the red legs of the pigeon, 
from the mud which remained on them, when the 
dove was sent forth from the ark. In short, there 
is nothing of an unusual kind, even the existence 
of a tree, the growth of unknown centuries, which, 



Pausanias, 1,21. 3 Luc. D. Syr. 8. op. 9, 91 

Pausanias, 1, 26. 4 Ovid, Met. 6, 668. 



TRANSMISSION OF NATIONAL CUSTOMS. 79 

to a people of lively imagination, does not serve as 
the material of a mythic legend. Most of them 
are of so romantic a cast, that their fictitious 
origin is evident at once ; others approaching more 
to an historical character, have been admitted as 
having at least a foundation in fact. But they 
usually betray themselves. The fifth labour of 
Hercules, for example, if treated as entirely the 
work of fancy, beyond the natural appearance 
which gave rise to it, may not appear a very grace- 
ful fiction ; but belonging wholly to the imagina- 
tion and to supernatural beings, we seek for no 
congruity or proportion in it. But how absurd 
does it become, if received as the history of the 
labour of an ancient Grecian hero, in cleansing 
the stable of a neighbouring king ! 

6. Another cause which has filled the ante-his- 
toric age with mythic tales, is the desire to explain 
the transmission of national customs, religious 
dogmas and rites from one country to another. 
The historical events which caused the strong re- 
semblances in these points, which we find, between 
Greece, Asia Minor, Phoenicia, Egypt, and even 
India, are as little known as those which caused 
the affinities of language, nor is every resemblance 



80 MYTHIC FICTIONS. 

a proof of transmission. But in ancient times it 
was assumed that transmission was the cause, nor 
was it enough that this transmission should be re- 
ferred to unknown ages and persons; definite 
names and circumstances were necessary, to satisfy 
the propensity of the mind, rather to cheat itself 
with fiction, than acquiesce in entire ignorance, or 
the bare knowledge of a general fact. No nation 
carried this further than the Greeks, who, while 
they received everything from foreigners, wished to 
appear as the authors of all they had borrowed. 
Their Hercules had gone to Lydia, to Phoenicia, to 
Egypt, to Libya, to Gades, wherever his worship 
was found established. Their Bacchus had led 
his train, or carried his conquests, wherever a god 
was adored with frantic orgies and phallic rites, or 
wherever a Nysa was found. Their lo had been 
carried to Phoenicia, and been placed at the head 
of the Egyptian Pantheon, under the name of 
Isis. These legends long passed for history ; but 
they were too repugnant to established facts, re- 
specting the relative antiquity of the Greek reli- 
gion and those of the East, to retain this authority. 
The same principle of explanation, however, has 
wrought by less obvious methods ; and much that 



ORIGIN OP LAWS AND ARTS. 81 

is still received as history, already begins to ap- 
pear as mythic, as the wanderings of Io, or the 
Indian expedition of the Theban Bacchus. 

7. The origin of society, the establishment of 
law, the invention of the arts, like the origin of 
the world, eluded historical research, and mytho- 
logy was called in to supply the deficiency. The 
learned work of Goguet, 1 in which are collected 
all the traditions which the ancients have left us 
on these subjects, affords ample proof of their un- 
certainty. We know what nations excelled and 
preceded others in civilization ; but when we at- 
tempt to go beyond these general facts, and assign 
institutions, usages and arts to definite persons 
and dates, we perceive directly that there is no 
historical evidence. Custom ripens into law, law 
is invested with the sanction of religion, art ad- 
vances by imperceptible degrees from rudeness to 
perfection, and all these changes have taken place 
before an\ historian is in being to record them. 
If customs and laws are in accordance with the or- 
dinary practice of mankind, and dictated by public 
benefit, they are attributed to human legislation. If 
apparently repugnant to these, a mythic origin is 
assigned to them, as the Egyptians referred their 

1 Origin of Laws, Arts and Sciences, 3 vols. Eng. Transl. 1775. 
E 5 



82 MYTHIC FICTIONS, 

intermarriage of brothers and sisters to the union 
of Isis and Osiris. 1 Etymology often shows us 
that the supposed name of the inventor is only a 
personal expression of the fact of the invention. 
The name of Jubal denotes a musical sound ; that 
of Tubal-cain, an artificer in brass. The Na'po7r£e, 
to whom the first working in brass is ascribed, 
(Clem. Strom. 307,) have been fixed upon, because 
vCjpoxp (Horn. II. ]3'. 578, et passim,) is an epithet 
of that metal. The art of grinding was said to 
have been first found out at Alesise, (a\£<rai, to 
grind,) in the Peloponnesus, by Myles, (fivXri, a 
millstone,) son of Lelex. Daedalus signifies the 
skilful; Prometheus, the ingenious. Each nation 
seeks to appropriate the glory of these inventions 
to itself j and those which are known to have been 
indebted to others for their civilization, are not 
the most backward in claiming originality. If we 
believe the Greeks, 2 the use of fire, of grain, the 
art of making bread, the establishment of laws, 
the institution of marriage, metallurgy, the fabri- 
cation of tools, shipbuilding, navigation, medicine, 
astronomy, were all invented by their gods or the 
forefathers of their race, and within the limits of 
their country. Their fictions had a fictitious con- 
1 Diod. 1, 27. 2 Goguet, 1, 159. 



ORIGIN OF LAWS AND ARTS. 83 

gruity, and even probability ; they did not ascribe 
these wonders to ordinary men, but to demigods 
and heroes, of whose powers, either of mind or 
body, those of ordinary humanity furnished no 
standard ; they believed themselves to be the au- 
tochthones of the soil, on which they had lived 
from the origin of all things, and therefore natu- 
rally presumed that the whole history of the human 
race, in its successive stages of civilization, was 
included in their own. Had they lived in a state 
of insulation from the rest of the world, we might 
have admitted their claim to these inventions, 
although it would still have been obvious, that the 
whole history and chronology of their introduction 
was fictitious. But Greece was separated from 
Asia, where the arts were of immemorial antiquity, 
by a strait not wider than an sestuary; it was 
visited by the fleets of the Phoenicians, and there- 
fore no one, with whom national pride does not 
supersede all evidence, can admit that any of these 
inventions were really made by the Greeks. But 
can we place more confidence in Phoenician le- 
gends, 1 when they tell us that Ousous first taught 
men to use the skins of beasts for clothing, and 
ventured to sea in a wooden canoe ; that Chrysor 
1 Sanchoniathon ap. Euseb. Praep. Evang. 1, 10. 



84 MYTHIC FICTIONS. 

invented rafts and fishing-tackle ; the Cabiri, navi- 
gation; Dagon, agriculture ; Technites and Au- 
tochthon, the art of brickmaking; Cronos, wea- 
pons of iron ? Or have the Babylonians more 
claim to be believed, when they represent their 
progenitors as living on the spontaneous produc- 
tions of the land and the marsh, till Oannes ap- 
peared and taught them every thing that per- 
tained to civilized life ? l Or are we to receive as 
history the Egyptian account of Osiris, 2 who, with 
his wife Isis, introduces the use of grain and the 
culture of the vine, and travels over the world, to 
communicate to its inhabitants the blessings of 
civilization ? Even if no names are assigned, and 
no supernatural agency is introduced, this does 
not alter the unreal character of the legend. The 
speculation of Lucretius, (v. 1255,) that the first 
smelting of metals was the result of an accidental 
conflagration among the mountains, was a mythos, 
(Strabo. 3. p. 147,) in regard to the mountains of 
Iberia. These various traditions neutralize each 
other; and leave us only the conclusion, that 
the real origin of all these arts and institu- 
tions, the names of their inventors, and the cir- 
cumstances of their introduction to the world, 
1 Euseb. Chron.p.6. ed. Scol. 2 Diodorus, 1, 17, 18. 






FOUNDERS OF STATES AND CITIES. 85 

were as unknown in the earliest times of historical 
composition, as they are in our own. 

It might be expected that this ignorance would 
cease with the establishment of civilized commu- 
nities, and that though the general history of 
mankind was lost, each nation had preserved, 
free from mythological mixture, the time and 
manner of its own origin, and the names and 
deeds of its own early kings and legislators. Yet 
such an instantaneous transition from fiction to 
history, from uncertainty to certainty, is not in 
itself probable, nor is it at all accordant with the 
character of the earliest special histories. The 
names which they contain, sometimes appear to 
have been derived from the name of the nation 
itself, as the Pelasgus, Ion, Dorus, iEolus, Hellen 
of the Greeks, who represent the names of the 
different tribes of Greece ; or from the names of 
the capital cities of monarchies, as the Egyptian 
Menes is supposed to have founded Memphis; 
Ninus, Nineveh ; and Romulus, Rome ; or from a 
river or a mountain in its neighbourhood. The 
principal god of the mythology of the country 
sometimes appears as an historical personage in 
the obscure commencement of history; thus Bel, 
the chief god of Phoenicia and Assyria, has been 



86 MYTHIC FICTIONS. 

converted into a king, Belus; and Semiramis is 
probably nothing else than an historical meta- 
morphosis of the great Syrian goddess Derceto. 1 
States appear to have slowly consolidated them- 
selves, and the true history of their progress was 
either never recorded, or had been lost before 
curiosity was awakened to inquire into it. Cities 
were formed by the gradual aggregation of 
jdwellings, and had either no founder, in the sense 
in which we apply that name to Alexander and 
Constantine, or had existed so long, in progressive 
stages, before a founder was inquired about, that 
no trace of him was preserved. In such a state 
of ignorance, to suppose a founder, whose name 
resembled that of the city, was a most obvious 
resource. It may be that in the age when the be- 
lief originated, such a practice was not without 
example ; but the mere allegation of the founder's 
name, unless the circumstances of the supposed 
foundation have an historical character, does not 
warrant the belief in his existence. The gods of 
those nations whose worship was anthropomor- 
phic, had been so completely invested with a 
human form, attributes and history, that it was 

1 Transactions of the Lit. ter, vol. iii. 2nd Series. 
and Philos. Soc. of Manches- 



MYTHIC AGE NO DEFINITE PERIOD. 87 

almost a necessary consequence that they should 
be supposed, at last, to have once been human 
beings ; and if so, who should have been more 
worthy of elevation to divinity, than the founder of 
the city or the kingdom, the warrior under whom 
their progenitors had conquered, or the chief who 
had led them to the country which they occupied ? 
Thus while the fact was, that the god had been 
brought down to the character of a mortal founder 
or chief, the mortal was supposed to have been 
raised to the rank of deity for his eminent services. 
If an epithet of the god, from its antique form, or 
obsolete root, lost its primary significance, it often 
happened, that he entered the list of kings or 
heroes, entirely in an historical character ; or else 
remained, under his familiar appellation, in the 
council of the gods, while the unknown epithet 
furnished a king to the national annals. Thus, 
even when we have reached the historic age, the 
shadowy personages of mythology are still inter- 
mingled with its realities. 

The mythic age is no definite period ; it has no 
chronology, except what has been given to it by 
those who, mistaking it for history, have endea- 
voured by arbitrary means to distribute its events 
in a probable succession, and connect them with 



88 MYTHIC AGE NO DEFINITE PERIOD. 

the historic age. From the circumstances of its 
creation, it is always referred to the earliest time 
at which a nation believes itself to have existed, 
but the mythic age of one country may fall within 
the historical times of another. The sovereigns of 
Egypt had raised monuments and inscribed them 
with representations of their exploits, and the 
chronology of their reigns, while Greece, accord- 
ing to its own mythology, was still peopled by 
demigods, and miracles were events of every 
day. From the Dorian Conquest downwards, 
Greece has a history; from the middle of the 
8th century before Christ, a chronology ; but 
even at the sera of the Olympiads, all is mythic 
legend in the history of Rome. Odin, according 
to Northern mythology, was leading his hosts from 
Asia to Scandinavia, and displaying the united 
attributes of a god, a warrior and a magician, at 
a time when the great men of Rome had learnt to 
treat Jupiter as a fable. It is fruitless labour to 
endeavour to establish synchronisms between my- 
thic and mythic, or mythic and historic times, 
to assign Danaus and Cadmus their place in the 
royal families of Egypt and Phoenicia ; to accom- 
modate the foundation of Rome to the capture of 
Troy, or settle what proconsul, by his Asiatic vie- 



MYTHIC AGE NO DEFINITE PERIOD. 89 

tories, drove Odin and his Ases into Scandinavia. 
Learning, acuteness, invention, mathematical skill, 
have been employed for ages in this task, but 
with no other result than to prove that what is 
fictitious in its origin, can never be brought into 
permanent union with history. Broken fragments 
may be reunited and restored ; even a quicksand 
may be made to support a solid edifice ; but who 
can give a foundation to a castle in the air ? 

We cannot, therefore, adopt the old division 
of past time into the uncertain, the mythic and the 
historic, 1 as comprehending three distinct and suc- 
cessive stages. In Egypt, for example, the histo- 
rical period begins with Menes ; all that precedes 
it, belongs to the uncertain. The people must 
have existed previously, and must have had a his- 
tory, but all its events are to us uncertain, though 
we may hope, by probable inferences from lan- 
guage, &c, to recover some general facts respecting 
them. But the mythic period, the reign of gods 
and demigods, is altogether imaginary, and it is 
only an arbitrary interpretation which would give 
it an historical character, as if it denoted the 
ascendancy of the priests. The reason why a 
mythic period so commonly precedes the historic, 
1 Varro ap. Aug. Civ. Dei, 18, 10. 



90 TRUE RELATION OF MYTHOS TO HISTORY. 

is, that the questions which, mythology employs 
itself in solving, often relate to matters really ante- 
cedent to history, and that its fictions would be 
too rudely encountered by facts, if not placed in a 
period of which no facts are recorded. 

The belief in the reality of mythic times and 
persons has so long held possession of the mind, 
that it acquiesces with great reluctance in conclu- 
sions which deprive us of so much that we have 
been accustomed to regard as at least substantially 
true. But though we cannot make mythic legends 
into history, there is much historical knowledge 
to be gained from them, when we have once seized 
the true point of view from which they are to be 
considered. They are proofs of the existence of a 
certain popular belief, and the circumstances 
which gave rise to it may be historical, though 
not the story in which it has been embodied. 
We may discard from our minds all belief in the 
personality and adventures of Cadmus ; there will 
still remain the fact, that the Greeks believed 
themselves to owe some of their gods and their 
civilization to Phoenicia ; and this belief could not 
have arisen, had there not been strong marks of 
affinity between their arts and religion, and deep 
traces of an early intercourse. iEneas and his 



TRUE RELATION OF MYTHOS TO HISTORY. 91 

adventures,, whether in Troy, in Libya, or in Italy, 
may be wholly mythic ; and yet the fact will re- 
main, that those who framed the legend of his 
migration, saw resemblances which led them to 
ascribe an iEolic origin to the Palladium and the 
Penates. When the Greeks made Dorus and 
iEolus the sons of Hellen, Achseus and Ion his 
grandsons, they were influenced by the fact, that 
all the Hellenes were closely united in religion, 
manners and language, but that the iEolian and 
Dorian tribes had more of the rudeness of primi- 
tive antiquity than the Achseans and lonians. If 
there be no reason to suppose that the belief of 
the Scandinavians in their own Asiatic origin, 
was an etymological inference from the name of 
Ases, or subsequent to their knowledge of the 
scriptural accounts of the diffusion of mankind, 
its existence would be a fact of great historical 
value, though Odin should be classed with purely 
mythic personages. The walls of Tiryns and Argos 
might have been justly concluded to be of colossal 
architecture and unknown antiquity, from the 
legend which ascribed them to the Cyclops, had 
no vestige of them remained. And when it is added, 
that these gigantic artificers came from Lycia, 
we learn not the fact of the builders having really 



92 TRUE RELATION OF MYTHOS TO HISTORY. 

migrated thence, but of the acknowledged priority of 
the Asiatic country in the cultivation of art, perhaps 
of early colonization. 1 These are properly histo- 
rical inferences ; but the use of mythology, rightly 
understood, to the historian, is not confined to 
these. As a product rather of the national than 
the individual mind, it gives a vivid image of na- 
tional character. Religious and moral feeling, 
knowledge, taste, the predominance of plastic or 
reflective power among the intellectual faculties, 
in ages from which no literary works have de- 
scended to us, may all be traced in the creations 
of mythology; and for this true picture of the 
people with whom they originated, we may well 
resign that delusive appearance of history, which 
is obtained by stripping away from them what is 
supernatural and absurd. 

If we thus abandon all hope of extracting from 
tradition, or deducing from written records, those 
precise dates, facts and localities which alone could 
constitute a history of primaeval times, nothing 
would seem to be left, but to receive the existence 
of the great oriental monarchies with which special 
history begins, as facts, the consequences of which 
we have to develop, without speculation on their 
1 Eur. Or. 963. Paus. 2, 25. Strab. 8. 572. Apollod. 2, 2. 



TRUE IDEA OF PRIMAEVAL HISTORY. 93 

causes. But the history of Man is the result of 
his moral, intellectual and physical being, and the 
influences to which he has been subjected by his 
relation to the system of Nature, of which he 
forms a part. To contemplate these relations is, 
therefore, to qualify ourselves for understanding 
his history. Further, in those great monarchies 
whose connection with the earliest movements 
and combinations of the human race we believe 
to be irrecoverably lost, we find an agreement in 
certain remarkable characters, the origin of which 
is reasonably sought in some general principles of 
our common nature ; since the special circum- 
stances of country and race under which they 
appear, are too various to admit of our attributing 
the cause to them. What has been commonly 
called conjectural history, has been unsatisfactory, 
because it has proceeded upon unproved assump- 
tions respecting the primitive condition of man- 
kind, and has been carried out by means of doubt- 
ful analogies. But if we assume nothing except the 
facts which constitute our earliest historical know- 
ledge, and seek to explain them from the faculties 
and affections of man, which in all ages are the 
same, we shall approach as nearly to a knowledge 
of primaeval history, as we can do in the entire 



94 RELATION OF MAN TO THE UNIVERSE. 

absence of positive testimony. To these two in- 
quiries, the remaining pages of this Essay will be 
devoted. 

The relations of Man to Nature are such as to 
show that he has been adapted by his Creator to 
the place which he occupies ; they harmonize with 
his powers and functions, and tend to the preser- 
vation of his own race, and of the other animated 
beings who are joined with him in the possession 
of the earth. 1 This harmony and adaptation are 
seen even in the laws which our globe obeys, as a 
portion of the solar system. If man could have 
existed at all, in a planet receiving so small a por- 
tion of heat from the Sun, or revolving around him 
in so long a period as Jupiter or Saturn, the de- 
velopment of his nature, under such different in- 
fluences, must have produced a series of events 
wholly unlike his actual history. 2 Even the spe- 
cial phenomena of this history are connected with 
the cosmical relations of the earth. A slight 
change in the obliquity of its axis, and the con- 
sequent position of the tropics, would have placed 
Ethiopia beyond, or Nubia and Egypt within, the 
range of the annual rains. In the former case, 

1 Paley, Nat. Theol. Ch. 17. 2 Herder Ideen zur Philoso- 
vii. phie der Geschichte, i. 7. 



RELATION OF MAN TO THE GLOBE. 95 

there would have been little or no deposit of fer- 
tilizing soil along the course of the Nile, and the 
whole history of civilization in the Western half of 
the globe would have been changed. On the other 
hand, had Egypt been subject to those violent alter- 
nations of drought and moisture which belong to a 
tropical climate, its monuments must have perish- 
ed before they had received their interpretation. 
If the Gulf Stream had not wafted the pro- 
ductions of America to the limits 1 of Europe, 
Columbus might never have discovered the exist- 
ence of a western continent. 

The influence of physical causes on the condition 
of man increases, as he is brought into nearer con- 
nection with them, in the structure of the globe, 
the surface of which has been the theatre of his 
history. The form of the ocean, and the distribu- 
tion of the two elements of land and water, have 
promoted or retarded the diffusion of the human 
race, and their arts and knowledge. Seas of 
limited extent, like the Mediterranean and the 
iEgean, the Arabian and Persian Gulfs, have faci- 
litated the early intercourse of mankind : oceans, 
like the Southern Pacific or Atlantic, have pre- 
sented a barrier which only scientific navigation 
1 Robertson's America, Book i. 



96 RELATION OF MAN TO THE GLOBE. 

could pass. Had the earth lain, according to the 
early conception of it, a round disk in the midst 
of the waters, 1 its immense continent would pro- 
bably have exhibited the same monotony and 
uniformity of life which now pervades Central 
Asia and Africa. Had it been entirely broken up 
into islands, the march of conquest and the great 
combinations of empire would have been pre- 
vented. 

A great change either in the proportion or the 
distribution of land and water on the surface of 
the terraqueous globe, must have produced a 
change in the events of human history. If Asia 
had been joined to Europe and Africa only in the 
arctic and torrid zones, and elsewhere been sepa- 
rated by a broad sea, without islands to serve as 
stepping stones, ages might have passed away, and 
civilization might still have been confined to the 
region in which it originated. 

If the strata, of which the covering of our globe 
consists, had remained in their original horizontal 
position, instead of a surface varying in height 
from the level of the sea to mountains of 25,000 
feet, man would have dwelt amidst boundless 
plains, without those natural barriers and marked 

1 Ukert, Geographie der Griechen und Romer, i. 2. p. 6. 



RELATION OF MAN TO THE GLOBE. 97 

divisions which have given variety both to his race 
and his history. 

The direction and composition of the mountain 
chains which, pushed from below by an internal 
force, now diversify the surface of the earth, has 
shaped the course of the rivers, on whose banks 
we find the earliest seats of ancient civilization. 
Climate, with its manifold influences both on the 
physical and the intellectual frame of man, and 
the mode of his subsistence, is determined, not 
merely by latitude, but by the respective elevation 
of different countries and their vicinity to the sea, by 
which temperature is equalized. " How entirely," 
says Humboldt, " would the temperature of the 
earth have been changed, and along with it the 
condition of vegetation, of agriculture and of 
human society, if the longer axis of the New Con- 
tinent had had the same direction with that of the 
old ; if the chain of the Andes had risen up from 
east to west ; if no tropical continent, like Africa, 
radiating heat from its surface, had lain to the 
south of Europe ; if the Mediterranean, which 
was once connected with th Caspian and the Red 
Sea, had not existed, and its bottom had been 
raised to an equal height with the plains of Lorn- 
p 



98 RELATION OF MAN TO THE GLOBE. 

bardy and the Cyrenaica ! " x The variety of the 
internal structure of the globe, as manifested at 
its surface by the revolutions of past ages, or dis- 
covered by man's own research, is a most impor. 
tant element among the circumstances which have 
determined his condition and history. He has 
been enabled to vary his mode of life according to 
the productions of each soil, and from these differ- 
ences in his mode of subsistence, other differences 
in manners, government and religion have flowed. 
The adaptation of the earth to the residence of 
man, is nowhere more manifest. In the produc- 
tions which its strata present, we see provision 
made for his well-being, even when nothing indi- 
cated that he was designed to be called into exist- 
ence. The precious metals, which have become 
the instrument of his civilization, are deposited in 
the clefts of one formation ; the coal and ironstone 
from which his tools, machinery and weapons are 
fashioned^ lie imbedded in another ; the materials 
of sculpture and architecture in a third. Even 
the variety produced in the aspect and vegetable 
clothing of the earth, by this arrangement of the 

1 Cosmos, p. 312. Germ. Europe, on the same parallel 

The same author points out of latitude, is owing to in- 

how the increase of cold, in creased remoteness of the tem- 

travelling eastward through pering sea, p. 351. 









GRADATION OF ANIMAL LIFE. 99 

strata of which it is composed, has contributed, 
by its influence on the imagination and taste, to 
develop the different powers of the mind, and 
diversify national character. 

We learn from the study of the remains of ex- 
tinct animals, which the interior of the earth has 
preserved, that man is the most perfect degree of 
a long gradation of organized beings, many por- 
tions of which have perished, and been replaced 
by others of a higher type, during a succession of 
ages, whose united or even single duration, science 
does not venture to guess. The rocks which we 
reach when we penetrate to the greatest depth, 
have assumed their actual form under the agency 
of fire as well as water ; and as fire destroys, while 
water preserves, the traces of life, we cannot con- 
clude with certainty that no life, animal or vege- 
table, preceded the formation of the rocks which 
immediately rest upon granite. The lowest of 
the sedimentary rocks are destitute of organic 
remains, except the tribe offuci. When animals 
begin to appear, they are of a lower order in 
creation, and less varied forms, than those with 
which the earth and the waters are now filled ; 
and it is generally, though not universally, true, 
that an ascending scale of life prevails as we ap- 
f2 



100 GRADATION OF ANIMAL LIFE. 

proach the time when the present surface of the 
globe emerged from the sea. 1 The gradations of 
this scale are more distinctly seen, from the point 
at which vertebrated animals make their first ap- 
pearance in the form of fishes. We know not the 
circumstances under which these successive races 
were brought into being, or became extinct. 
There is no reason to conclude that they were 
extinguished by sudden and simultaneous cata- 
strophes, throughout the whole space which their 
remains occupy, and succeeded by new and instan- 
taneous creations. The condition in which they 
are found, renders this probable in particular cir- 
cumstances, but not as an universal fact or a 
general law ; since some species disappear, simul- 
taneously with a great change in the composition 
of the strata, while others run on, and only gra- 
dually vanish. Each of the changes in the con- 
dition of the earth, the waters and the atmosphere, 
which constitute the physical history of our planet, 
appears to have been attended with changes more 
or less extensive in the forms and habits of the 
living tribes which peopled them. The same re- 
mark applies to vegetable life, the remains of 
which, in the latest of the tertiary strata, bear the 
1 Phillips' Geology, 1, 128. 97. 



PERMANENCE OF SPECIES. 101 

nearest resemblance to that which now covers the 
surface of the globe. As its condition approached 
to that under which the human race now lives, and 
chemical, electrical and magnetic forces reached 
that state of equipoise which makes their agency 
preservative and not destructive, animal life be- 
came more varied, more abundant and more ana- 
logous to that of man. It may be a law of Nature, 
that the altered condition of the elements shall be 
slowly followed by changes of organs and structure 
which at length amount to specific or even generic 
differences ; or it may have been the order of crea- 
tive operation, to bring into being new races, when- 
ever the earth, in its progress from its primaeval to 
its present state, was prepared generally or partially 
to receive and preserve them. On either supposition, 
the correspondence between the world and its inha- 
bitants, at any given period, is the result of adap- 
tation; either equally excludes the absurdity of 
self-production. The question cannot be decided 
by historical evidence, but this, as far as it goes, 
is unfavourable to the supposition that Nature 
gradually exchanges one species for another. We 
trace nothing like a waste of power in abortive 
attempts to produce new forms, subsequently 
abandoned from their unsuitableness. We see in 



102 PERMANENCE OF SPECIES. 

the present order of things, no tendency to the 
production of new species, nor to the extinction 
of the old except by violent causes. Since the 
commencement of history, man appears to have 
been surrounded in his domestic circle, by the 
same groupe of animals, subdued to his service, 
and beyond it, by the same hostile inhabitants 
of the forest and the desert. This law of per- 
manence, as far as we can judge, belongs also 
to the vegetable world. We may observe too, as 
an example of the adaptation of man to the cir- 
cumstances in which he was placed upon the 
earth, that it appears to have been inhabited, in 
a period not long preceding that of his creation, 
by animals of the same general character as those 
now found upon it, but much surpassing them in 
size and power. Unassisted by the resources of 
art, he would have been little fitted to cope with 
such animals as the hyaenas of the cave of Kirk- 
dale, and the other huge carnivora, whose fossil 
bones remain, or even the stag of the Irish bogs. 

There is a wide difference of opinion among 
natural philosophers, as to the causes which have 
produced the past revolutions of the globe. While 
some regard them as the effect of agencies once 
infinitely more energetic than they are at present, 



103 

to others they seem capable of being explained 
by means still in operation. That in geological, 
as distinguished from historical, times, there was 
nothing like a gradual decline of that internal 
force by which our continents were raised, is clear, 
from the circumstance, that both the Alps and 
the Andes have been elevated through very recent 
strata. The changes which it has undergone, 
since man became its inhabitant, appear, however, 
to be entirely explicable by existing causes. We 
find no remains of human beings, or the domestic 
animals, buried among the vegetable and animal 
productions, which attest the former prevalence of 
a tropical heat, far northward in the temperate 
zone. We never find them imbedded in strata 
which have been elevated since their consolidation 
beneath the water, nor associated with extinct 
species, nor even amidst superficial accumula- 
tions, which the present forces of nature, acting 
in their present manner, are not sufficient to ex- 
plain. We can thus assign with probability the 
geological sera of man's appearance on the earth; 
he is contemporaneous with its most recent state 5 
and a portion of a system of organized beings, 
which, as far as we can see, is permanent in its 
existing forms. This is the only kind of chro- 



104 jera of man's creation. 

nology which can be applied to such a case. The 
absolute age of the world, reckoned backward in 
years from some historical epoch, can never be 
assigned, because its formation has been progres- 
sive^ and we have not even an approximate mea- 
surement of the time which each stage has occu- 
pied. We cannot fix in years the commencement 
of that stage which we have called the most re- 
cent, and to which man belongs. We know that 
an infinite time has not elapsed, since the frag- 
ments of the mountain began to accumulate them- 
selves in a slope around its base, the sestuary and 
the lake to be filled by the deposit of the streams 
which flow into them, or the cataract to wear away 
the face of the rock over which it is precipitated ; 
but in no single case are we sufficiently acquainted 
with the laws which regulate these changes, to 
calculate the time required to produce the whole 
existing effect. It is not probable, indeed, that 
on every part of the earth's surface, these changes 
began simultaneously. As far as any estimate 
can be formed, 1 the time necessary to produce 

1 Cuvier (Theory of the mon chronology of the De- 
Earth, Eng. Tr. p. 133) and luge; but they are unsatis- 
De Luc (Geological Travels, factory, from the causes men- 
passim) have collected many tioned in the text, and might 
facts of this kind, for the pur- be met by many of an oppo- 
pose of supporting the com- site tendency. 



BIRTH-PLACE OF THE HUMAN RACE. 105 

them would much exceed the utmost limits of our 
common chronology of the history of man. 

He thus appears to have been placed upon the 
earth when it had reached such a state, that he 
was able, by means of his instincts and faculties, to 
preserve and improve his being. The capacity of 
self-preservation by means of instinct, belongs 
to all animated species ; that of self-improvement, 
to man alone. It is the alte terminus hcerens 
which for ever separates him from the most highly 
organized order of inferior animals, and it is this 
alone which gives him a history. But as we can 
assign no absolute date to his introduction into 
the world, nor even decide with confidence whe- 
ther this took place by simultaneous or succes- 
sive acts of creative power, so it is impossible to 
define the time which he occupied in advancing 
from his primaeval condition to that in which he 
appears at the commencement of history. 

The same feeling which induced the Roman 
poet to assign the creation of the human race to 
spring, 1 leads us to Asia as the cradle in which 
their infancy was fostered. Its temperate climate 
and fertile soil were best adapted to their preser- 
vation and increase, when they were not yet pos- 
1 Virg. Georg. 2, 335. 
F 5 



106 BIRTH-PLACE OF THE HUMAN RACE. 

sessed of means to extract food from barren soils, 
or obtain shelter in rigorous seasons. The most 
authentic traditions, and the ascertained progress 
of civilization, concur with this presumption. 
The Western parts of Europe were civilized by 
Roman conquest ; the Romans only brought into 
Gaul, Spain and Britain, the arts and knowledge 
which they had themselves received from Greece ; 
the Greeks recognized Egypt and Asia as the 
source whence their own art and science had pro- 
ceeded. In the Ancient world, at least, there is no 
authenticated instance of any insulated community 
attaining to high eminence in arts and knowledge. 
Egypt can scarcely be considered as an exception 
to the fact, that all which distinguishes civilized 
man has been derived from Asia; where Africa 
approaches Asia, or is known to have had communi- 
cation with it, there we find civilization — but bar- 
barism in all other regions : a reasonable pre- 
sumption that Egypt, though geographically part 
of Africa, owes nothing to this connection, except 
an element of her population. The Southern 
latitudes of Asia are pointed out by a variety of 
circumstances, — by their genial climate, by their 
being the native country of the domestic animals, 
and by their rich variety of spontaneous vegetable 



SEAT OF THE EARLIEST CIVILIZATION. 107 

productions, as a suitable theatre for the early 
history of man. But whether China or India, the 
valley of the Euphrates and the Tigris, or some 
intermediate region, as Bactriana, can claim to 
have been the point whence civilization has dif- 
fused itself, is a question which we have no means 
of deciding. Nor can we absolutely pronounce, 
that no elder people preceded even the eldest of 
these, from whom they may have received the 
knowledge of which they have been immemorially 
in possession. History is silent respecting any 
such people : and the theories of Bailly, that the 
traces of their science are to be found in the astro- 
nomy of the Eastern nations; and of Gosselin, 1 
that the earliest measures of the earth are the 
remnants of a system of measurement, prior to 
the times of historical tradition — have made few 
converts. About 3000 years before the Christian 
sera is the utmost limit to which we can carry up 
the history of civilization, and from this time to 
our own, the line of its descent is unbroken. 

Man has no history except in the social state, 
which is so congenial to his nature and so essen- 

1 See his Dissertation pre- from Bailly. Gatterer sup- 
fixed to the French Transla- posed the Phoenicians to be 
tion of Strabo. The idea ap- the authors of these ancient 
pears to have been borrowed measurements. 



108 MAN ESSENTIALLY SOCIAL. 

tial to the development of his faculties, that if the 
human race were not created under such circum- 
stances as to allow of his entering at once into 
social relations, he would form them as soon as 
their numbers had multiplied sufficiently. The 
steps by which he attained the condition in which 
we find him, in the earliest history, are unknown, 
and no speculation will enable us to recover 
them. We have no ground for assuming that all 
mankind once lived by the chace, that the pasturage 
of cattle was their next occupation, and that they 
reached the agricultural state only after being 
long detained in the inferior stages of culture. 
There is no reason to believe that the Troglodytes 
of the Red Sea, or the Ichthyophagi of the Persian 
Gulf, or the Nomadic tribes of Arabia or Tartary, 
represent the state in which the progenitors of the 
civilized nations in their neighbourhood lived. 
The mode of subsistence depends on soil and cli- 
mate ; the pastoral life becomes necessary, where 
corn cannot be raised, and the nomadic, or that of 
a wandering shepherd, where pasture is found only 
at intervals. Nations who follow this mode of life, 
usually live under the simplest form of polity in 
which society can hold together; whereas the 
high cultivation of land implies its secure posses- 



THEORIES OF THE PROGRESS OF CIVILIZATION. 109 

sion, and this again the establishment of law. 
But nothing indicates that man necessarily passes 
through the pastoral to the agricultural state. A 
country which, from its marshes and forests, was 
once unfit for agriculture, may be rendered fit for 
tillage ; but even in this case it will generally be 
found that its population has been changed, or 
that some external impulse has given rise to the 
improvement. History does not furnish a single 
example of a nation emerging, by its own efforts, 
from the condition of hunters, fishers, or shep- 
herds. Such changes have always been brought 
about by contact with a more civilized race, and 
very generally purchased by the loss of national 
independence, or even personal liberty. 

As man can have no history but in the social 
state, so we cannot conceive of him as existing 
without the use of Language. It is not so pro- 
perly an invention of man, that is, the result of his 
intellect acting upon the powers and properties of 
things extraneous to himself, as an instinctive func- 
tion of the combined organs of thought and utter- 
ance. The object of this instinct is communica- 
tion, and its apparent absence in those who have 
been brought up in an insulated state, is no ob- 
jection to its being a natural function of man, 



110 ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. 

even if there were no reason to suppose that the 
individuals in question were half idiotic by nature. 
It is as natural to the human being to speak arti- 
culately^ as to the brutes to communicate by in- 
articulate sounds. The difficulty which has been 
felt in conceiving how language should have 
originated, has been caused by considering it as 
something purely arbitrary and conventional ; and 
as such a conventional system could scarcely be 
established without the use of language, it seemed 
that the existence of the thing to be explained 
was involved in the explanation of its origin. 
But that it is not arbitrary in its forms, is 
proved by the circumstance, which Adelung has 
noticed, that the roots of any language will be 
found not to exceed a few hundreds, while the 
possible combinations of vocal sound, even exclud- 
ing those which are too harsh for pronunciation, 
amount to a number hardly to be expressed by 
figures. 1 The etymology and grammar of lan- 
guage clearly show, that their growth and forma- 

^MithridateSjEinl.p.xvi.xv. mont 330 — 350 in the Chi- 
" Fulda found in the German nese." On the other hand, 
from 300 — 400 roots; Court "Leibnitz, in his Ars Cowhi- 
de Gebelin, not 400 in the natoria, makes the combina- 
French ; Fourmont, only 300 tions of 24 letters exceed half 
in the Greek, with all its co- a quadrillion." 
piousness; Bayer and Four- 



ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. Ill 

tion from these simple elements has not been an 
arbitrary process, but has been carried on with a 
purpose of making vocal sound a more exact repre- 
sentative of the operations and affections of the 
mind. It is true, that language, as we now see it 
propagated, appears to be learnt by passive imita- 
tion. Yet the child, following some internal im- 
pulse of his own, is for ever showing a disposition 
to go beyond the barriers which grammar and usage 
have set up, to coin new words, or follow out new 
analogies. If, in the absence of all recorded ex- 
ample of the manner in which language has been 
formed, we may venture to speculate on its pro- 
gress, we should seek its origin in the imitation of 
the sounds of external nature. Words framed in 
evident imitation of these sounds, are found in all 
languages, the most polished, as well as the most 
rude. The range of this onomatopoeia in any lan- 
guage bears, indeed, a very small proportion to 
the whole number of its roots : but when once the 
difficulty of mutual understanding had been got 
over, by the association of this sound, with the 
natural object or phenomenon which the sound 
characterized, it would be easy to derive from 
these a multitude of analogical meanings, sounds 
of peculiar quality being connected, by a natural 



112 ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. 

affinity, with mental states and emotions. The 
further we recede from audible resemblances be- 
tween the word and the thing signified, the more 
difficult we find it to fix, in what the relation be- 
tween word and thought consists. Even when we 
feel its existence most strongly, we are at a loss to 
define it. Yet were there not some such natural 
connection, which, though obscurely felt on both 
sides, aided the speaker to select the word which 
he makes the symbol of his thought, and the 
hearer to appreciate its significance, there could 
have been no advance towards mutual understand- 
ing among men. The establishment of language 
would be greatly aided by the plasticity of the 
human countenance, which is furnished with 
muscles not found in the irrational animals, whose 
sole use is to express the feelings ; and by the range 
of imitative gesture supplied by the hands. 1 

Speech is one of the most unchangeable habits 
of mankind, if we regard the elements and great 
analogies of language ; and a common speech one 
of the closest bonds of the social union. Finding, 
therefore, that the migrations and intermixture of 
nations, where they can be historically traced, 

1 Sir C.Bell, Anatomy of Expression, Essay v. p. 121. 



AFFINITY OF LANGUAGES. 113 

leave proofs of their occurrence in similarity of 
language, we are entitled to infer that where the 
same similarity exists, without any historical solu- 
tion, migration and intermixture have been the 
cause. The certainty of this conclusion will not 
be weakened by what has been said of the natural 
connection between sounds and the objects or 
ideas which they express, except where it is pushed 
so far, as to make the coincidence of a few words 
in two different languages, a ground for maintain- 
ing the original identity or affinity of nations. 
This principle, which, followed out under the con- 
trol of the rules of inductive philosophy, has fur- 
nished modern inquirers with so many curious 
conclusions respecting the early connection of 
nations, widely separated by their present locality, 
no doubt led men also, in very remote times, to 
speculate on the affinity of those tribes whose 
speech they had the means of observing and com- 
paring. Such speculations must necessarily be 
crude, because the philosophical study of the 
analogies of language was unknown in the ancient 
world, even in the period of its highest intellectual 
culture, and the means of acquiring an accurate 
knowledge of a foreign tongue were very scanty. 
Where we find a nation carrying up the line of its 



114 AFFINITY OF LANGUAGES. 

own descent to the commencement of the human 
race, we find also that it assumes, in its specula- 
tions and etymologies, the high or primseval anti- 
quity of its own language. According to the 
popular conceptions of the Jews, the primitive 
language of mankind was precisely the same as 
that in which their earliest literature was composed. 
Even in the ante-diluvian history, all the etymolo- 
gies are purely Hebrew. To one who inquires into 
the causes of the visible affinity of language among 
nations, with an accurate knowledge of their struc- 
ture, and of the various circumstances of an eth- 
nographical kind, which must be considered in 
connection with language, the problem appears 
very complex, and its historical solution doubtful, 
if not impossible. Such difficulties would not 
embarrass those whose attention was caught in 
early times by the obvious fact of a similarity of 
speech; and as the problem was simple, genea- 
logical descent offered a simple solution of it. The 
oldest and most remarkable document of this kind, 
is that contained in the tenth chapter of the Book 
of Genesis. If it be regarded as exhibiting the 
state of knowledge and opinion among the people 
with whom it originated, respecting the relation- 
ship of the tribes of men, whose languages were 



AFFINITY OF LANGUAGES. 115 

known to them, it will be found to contain mate- 
rials for history of the highest value. That know- 
ledge, however, was certainly imperfect in extent, 
if not in quality, and the opinions founded upon 
it, must, therefore, be open to correction from 
other sources. It proceeds throughout, upon the 
supposition, that personal descent has been the 
origin of national affinity; and thus not only names 
evidently plural, as Mizraim, Ludim, Philistim, 
and collective names, as Cush and Elisha, appear 
as individuals, parents of nations, in its tables of 
descent, but even names of cities, as Tarshish and 
Sidon. As it originated among a people who 
themselves belonged to the family which claimed 
the patriarch Shem for their progenitor, it points 
out the affinity which united its different branches, 
the Assyrians, 1 Syrians, Hebrews and Arabians, 
an affinity attested, by independent evidence, and 
the close resemblance of their languages, most of 
them existing at the present hour. But we are 
not to expect the same accuracy in regard to 
nations which lay beyond the sphere of their ob- 
servation, or to find the traces of one original 



1 Gesenius (Heb. Spr. 62) Arabian family, but, as it ap- 
denies that the Assyrian Ian- pears, on insufficient grounds, 
guage belonged to the Syro- 



116 AFFINITY OF LANGUAGES. 

language, among the various tribes to whom Ham 
and Japheth are assigned as progenitors. In 
regard to them we must have recourse to other 
evidence, chiefly brought to light by the researches 
of the last half century. By means of these it 
has been shown, that a similarity both in roots and 
in structure, too close and too extensive to be the 
result of accident, has extended from the Penin- 
sula of India, through Bactriana and Persia, 
Greece and Italy, and the furthest limits of the 
Celtic, Gothic and Slavonic tribes in Europe. 
Such a similarity, reasoning from known pheno- 
mena, we can only attribute to affinity or inter- 
mixture of the nations by whom these languages 
were spoken. Yet in history there is no record, 
not even a tradition, of any events by which such 
intermixture can be explained ; we cannot even 
frame a theory to account for it, without supposing 
a state of things entirely different from that con- 
dition of the world, which history at its opening 
discloses to us. Where the affinity is most evi- 
dent, we cannot say with certainty which is the 
elder, which the parent, and which the child. The 
study of comparative philology is, indeed, still in 
its infancy, and its progress has been embarrassed, 
in this country at least, by the tacit or express 



AFFINITY OF LANGUAGES. 117 

assumption, that the existence of nations speaking 
languages so different as to be mutually unintel- 
ligible, was separated by the interval of only a few 
generations from the time when the whole human 
race had one uniform speech. From this young 
but vigorous science, much clearer insight into the 
affinities and filiations of mankind may be expect- 
ed ; but the times in which they were established 
will still remain essentially ante-historic. The 
wide-spread family of languages, which has been 
called Indo-European, differs in most of its roots, 
still more in its etymological principles and gram- 
matical forms, from the Semitic or Syro -Arabian 
family. Of the people supposed to be descended 
from Ham, only one, the Egyptian, has handed 
down to us any memorials of its ancient language ; 
but these are sufficient to show that it differed 
essentially from both the foregoing. The mono- 
syllabic languages of Eastern Asia, those of the 
nomadic nations in its Northern and Central re- 
gions, of the interior of Africa, the islands of the 
Indian Seas and the Pacific, and of the New 
World, do not come within our view in treating of 
primaeval history. They are so manifold and vari- 
ous, that it is impossible to assign to them a com- 
mon origin in a single locality, without ascending to 



118 INVENTION OF WRITTEN CHARACTERS. 

an antiquity far exceeding all authentic chrono- 
logy. A period so limited as that which is ordi- 
narily supposed is quite inadequate to explain the 
difference which has existed, from the very com- 
mencement of history, between the Goptic and 
Syro- Arabian languages, or even the Hebrew and 
the Syriac. 1 To the historian, the great nations 
of antiquity are autochthones ; we cannot say 
whence or at what time the Egyptians came into 
Egypt, or the Hindus into India; or even the 
Pelasgi and Hellenes into Greece. 

We have said that speech is rather a function 
than an invention of man, but the employment of 
a written symbol to record and communicate the 
spoken word is properly an invention, and the 
most important of all those by which civilization 
has been advanced. All that lies before the time 
of its introduction has been irretrievably lost to 
history, and much no doubt that happened after 
that event, and before its application to the pur- 
pose of preserving history. Its use in some form 
or other is immemorial in Egypt and Asia, but 
we cannot even conjecture the date of its inven- 
tion 5 or the time and manner of its diffusion. 
What we find in ancient authors on these subjects 
1 Gen. 31, 47. 



INVENTION OF WRITTEN CHARACTERS. 119 

are evidently mythic fictions of a much later age. 
The Egyptians referred it to a Thoth, the Jews to 
Seth, or his children/ the Greeks to Hermes. 
But Thout in Coptic, 2 IW in Hebrew, 'Ep/mrjg 3 in 
Greek, are all names for a pillar or post ; and the 
real fact hidden under these several fables, is that 
a pillar was the earliest monument on which the 
art of writing was employed, or at least, as being 
the most durable, passed for the most ancient. We 
are carried back, by retracing the history of the 
diffusion of the art, to the same region in which 
we have already found the earliest marks of civili- 
zation, but we cannot fix on any precise spot to 
which its origin may be referred. The Phoenician 
alphabet has been the parent of the Greek and 
Roman, and it is not improbable that it has itself 
originated from the phonetic alphabet of the 
Egyptians, which is known to have been in use 
at the building of the pyramids. This alphabet 
represented fifteen sounds, R and L not being dis- 
tinguished. The appropriation of a separate cha- 
racter for one of these would give sixteen, the 
original number of the Greek alphabet. 4 

1 Joseph. Ant. i. 2, 3. epfia and kpfxis. II. a', 486. Od. 

2 Peyron, Lexicon Linguae rj', 278. 

Copticae s. voc. Gen. 19, 26. 4 Plut. Plat. Quaest. x. 1. p. 

in the Coptic version. 1009. F. Pliny, N. H. 7, 56. 

* This is the Homeric use of 



120 ALPHABETS OF VARIOUS ORIGIN. 

This phonetic use of hieroglyphic characters 
would lead us to regard picture-writing as the re- 
mote source of the alphabet; but in the cunei- 
form character of the Persepolitan inscriptions we 
have an example of an alphabet which has no 
connection with picture-writing, and has evidently 
been formed by combinations of a single charac- 
ter. The antiquity of the inscriptions existing at 
Persepolis, and other places within the dominions 
of the Achsemenidse, is not very great ; but the 
bricks which compose the ruined structures of 
Babylon bear impressions of a character very 
closely allied, though not identical. The Devana- 
gari, the character in which the Sanscrit Litera- 
ture is written, bears no resemblance to any of 
the alphabets of Western Asia: and that of 
China, and the countries in which monosyllabic 
languages prevail, is not alphabetical. It denotes 
objects and ideas by immediate association with 
the visible sign appropriated to them, not by 
analysis of the sounds of language. We have thus, 
in four great centres of ancient civilization, four 
separate modes of denoting and communicating 
thought, so dissimilar to each other, as to lead to 
the conclusion, that they are separate inventions. 

It has been a speculation, that mankind had 



EARLIEST SEATS OF CIVILIZATION. 121 

their first abode on mountains, or at least in 
elevated regions, because these were first left dry 
by the retreating waters of the Deluge, or first 
raised by the expansive central force ; or because 
they afforded security during the prevalence of 
lawless violence. Yet it is certain that the earliest 
known seats of civilization in the East were the 
rich alluvial soil, which forms the banks of mighty 
rivers. These, under every climate, invite the 
early settlements of men, by their various conve- 
niences ; but in those latitudes in which history 
begins, a plain without a river is a desert, the 
sky either furnishing, as in Egypt, no moisture by 
which exhalation can be replaced, or only at such 
long intervals that a drought would regularly inter- 
vene between the rainy seasons. Such countries, 
being in some measure insulated by the chains of 
hills which bound them, favour the tranquil diffu- 
sion of population, and the commencement of the 
social union. The nucleus, at least, of the great 
kingdoms which we find in existence when history 
begins, appears to have been formed of tribes 
speaking the same language ; and without this 
bond, no voluntary coalition would probably have 
taken place. In the valley of the Nile, below 
Syene, and on the banks of the Mesopotamian 

G 



122 ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT. 

rivers, only one language, with dialectic differences, 
prevailed. We know less of India, but if it be 
true that the Sanskrit, though now obsolete, runs 
through all the native idioms of the Peninsula, we 
may conclude that it was once the national lan- 
guage. Not only is there no sympathy, tending 
to union, between those who speak different lan- 
guages — there is absolute repugnance; they are 
barbarians to each other. With a community of 
language, similarity of institutions and religion is 
naturally combined, and the belief of a common 
origin binds all together, by a tie as strict and 
sacred as that of family. Even the physical re- 
semblances which generally prevail among those 
whose speech is the same, dispose to union, and a 
marked difference is a cause of repulsion. 

Government originates in the instinct of man 
for society : none of its purposes can be attained 
without the control of some superior. He not only 
submits, from necessity, to force greater than his 
own, but from a natural sentiment to greater wis- 
dom and superior virtue. It is, indeed, as much from 
sentiment as from necessity, that he is so generally 
disposed to yield pre-eminence to those whom 
nature has marked by their greater strength and 
loftier stature ; since the difference in brute force, 



ABSOLUTE MONARCHY. 123 

which this conformation gives, might easily be 
compensated by the combination of the weaker. 
Submission to authority being, therefore, an indis- 
pensable condition of society, man falls into it, 
without any formal compact, stipulating protec- 
tion on one side, and obedience on the other. "We 
find in the earliest historic times, mankind not only 
obeying the patriarchal authority of age and wis- 
dom, but living under monarchies, and even here- 
ditary monarchies, in which the law of succession 
places absolute power in the hands of feeble- 
ness and folly. Absurd as such a' rule may 
appear, when tried by the standard of utility, there 
is no ground for believing that it was always im- 
posed on an unwilling people, by foreign conquest 
or military usurpation. Nor is its origin to be 
sought in the hereditary transmission of wealth 
and its attendant power, nor in the artifices of 
parental affection, or ambition desirous to pro- 
long its authority, after death, in the line of its 
descendants. It is sentiment, not a calculation of 
benefit, which made, and still makes, the nations 
of the East, like those of Russia, glory in the 
power of their sovereign, though it involves their 
own servitude, and sacrifice life and substance for 
his gratification. The fiction of a divine nature 
g2 



124 HEREDITARY MONARCHY. 

or descent may increase this sentiment, but is not 
its primary source. It is because their king is 
glorious and venerable in their eyes, that they 
readily lend themselves to this belief; the fiction 
is but the expression of a deep and pervading feel- 
ing. The same sentiment is transferred, by a 
natural association, from the parent to the child, 
who is more readily acknowledged as chief than 
the son of a stranger. The impulse of feeling 
may be controlled by considerations of utility, 
interest may be stronger than gratitude, state 
necessity may demand the throne for an abler or 
an older man; and hereditary right, so strongly 
guarded by law and opinion as to resist all these 
considerations, implies an artificial state of society. 
But in its origin it is congenial to human nature, 
and the same sentiment operates in common life, 
to secure to the child what the father has pos- 
sessed. The oriental mind has always been more 
imaginative than that of the western nations; 
political institutions in the East have been little 
influenced by reasonings on the purpose of go- 
vernment, and the feeling of reverence and sub- 
mission towards the monarch has there exhibited 
an intensity and depth, which, with us, is at most 
occasional. Yet, considerations of utility may 



HEREDITARY ARISTOCRACY. 125 

have enforced and perpetuated what natural senti- 
ment had begun. One of the first wants of society 
is a strong executive for the maintenance of order. 
Monarchy best provides for this, and the tyranny 
into which it easily degenerates is acquiesced in, 
for the sake of a great and permanent good. 

Aristocracy, as a 'transmitted distinction, owes, 
like monarchy, its influence over mankind, more to 
sentiment than to the material superiority, confer- 
red by wealth, or strength, or military skill. It may 
be reasonably presumed to have originated in excel- 
lence of some kind ; but its roots everywhere reach 
beyond the commencement of history. We may 
trace our own aristocracy, from its actual founda- 
tion in custom and law, to the appropriation of 
land by victorious chieftains, in the Conquest of 
England, or the overthrow of the Western Em- 
pire, but an aristocracy of descent already existed 
in Germany, 1 distinct from military rank, when 
fixed property in land, and the use of the precious 
metals, were unknown. 

Law has its origin in the sentiments and sym- 
pathies of mankind ; the magistrate, whatever be 
his name, does not give to them their notions of 

1 Tac. Mor. Germ. 7. Reges sumunt. Comp. 5. 26. 
ex nobilitate, duces ex virtute 



126 ORIGIN OF LAW. 

justice and right, but fulfils, or at most completes 
and defines, the conception, which nature has im- 
planted in their breasts, and upholds the general 
and lasting conviction of the community, against 
the passion or interest of the individual. A state 
in which no feeling of social duty, no sense of the 
rights of a fellow-man, existed, is as much a fiction 
as the golden age, in which there was no selfish- 
ness and no crime. But this sympathy, which all 
legislation, whether human or divine, presupposes, 
and without which no code, whether enforced by 
temporal or eternal sanctions, would be efficacious, 
is unfolded by slow degrees, and a right not sup- 
ported by might, would be imperfectly acknow- 
ledged, and violated at every impulse. Among 
the nations who were earliest in civilization, and 
consequently in history, three circumstances prin- 
cipally distinguish the social relations from our 
own — the relative condition of man and woman, of 
parent and child, of master and slave. One prin- 
ciple pervades them all, that sacrifice of the hap- 
piness of the weaker to the stronger, which man 
is always prone to exact, when his selfishness is 
not controlled by his own affections, or by the 
more enlightened views and more humane feeling 
of the community to which he belongs. 



CONJUGAL RELATION. 127 

This knowledge and feeling, however, will not 
be far in advance of that of the individual, and 
domestic relations are of too refined and subtle 
a nature to admit of much control by positive law. 
They usually remain what natural sentiment has 
made them. The indirect control of an enlight- 
ened public opinion, which is even more efficacious 
than law, in checking the influence of selfishness 
and passion in domestic life, and procuring respect 
to the rights of the weaker, could scarcely exist in 
early times, when the means of the communica- 
tion of opinion were so limited. 

1. Marriage is an institution coeval with civili- 
zation, and it is only in mythology that we find 
an origin assigned to it. 1 The permanent union 
of those between whom the conjugal relation has 
existed, and been followed by the birth of children, 
is the result of natural sentiment, and its import- 
ance to the order of society is so obvious, that it 
has early received the sanction of law. But it re- 
quires a much higher refinement of this natural 
sentiment to limit this union to one. In the 
East, where women grow old at an earlier age than 
in our climate, monogamy meets with a strong 
obstruction in the passions of the male sex, and 
1 Goguet, i. p. 22. 



128 



PARENTAL RELATION. 



has never established itself, except where religion 
has condemned polygamy, or poverty has made 
the expensive luxury of the harem unattainable. 1 

2. Nature herself gives into the hands of the 
parent a power more despotic than she grants in 
any other relation. To the difference of physical 
strength is added that of a matured and an infant 
understanding ; life, subsistence, health, the com- 
munication of knowledge — all depend on the 
pleasure of the father, who, as master in the con- 
jugal relation, disposes of the fate of the common 
offspring. But this terrible power is tempered by 
a force of sympathy, which no other relation ex- 
hibits, to guard against its abuse ; and many 
strong feelings intervene, to shield the helpless- 
ness of the child. Pride, as well as affection, inte- 
rests the father in behalf of his son ; it is through 
him that he hopes to live in a future generation ; 
it is to his love that he must trust for that care 
which his declining years will demand. Still the 
general characteristic of the relation between the 
parent and the child in early times, as far as his- 
tory has preserved any account of it, is, that the 

1 The counterpart of poly- men, does not appear to have 

gamy, what has been called prevailed among the nations 

polyandria, the possession of of the East in early times, 
the same woman by many 



SLAVERY. 129 

parent enjoyed a degree of irresponsible authority, 
much greater than modern legislation allows. 
The humanity of the laws of Egypt forbade the 
exposure of infants; in the other great mo- 
narchies even this restriction does not appear 
to have been placed upon the patria potestas. 
Where the direct power of government is the 
least, the greatest rigour and hardness prevails in 
the domestic relations ; they supply the place of 
legal authority, in keeping society together, and 
it is only a government both vigilant and strong 
that could undertake their regulation. 

3. The abolition of slavery is one of the last 
effects of the growth of a more comprehensive 
sympathy, in purifying the social relations, from 
institutions founded on the abuse of strength. In 
the earliest ages it was universal, and no senti- 
ment forbade the application of the same right of 
possession to a fellow-creature and a brute. It 
may often have originated in voluntary compact, 
under the influence of want, more frequently in 
war, kidnapping, or a judicial sentence for debt or 
crime. The impossibility of regulating by law 
such a relation as that of master and slave, is a 
fatal objection to its existence, even where law is 
most humane in its spirit, and vigorous in its 
g5 



130 INSTITUTION OF CASTES. 

execution ; and in the absence of legal protection, 
that which the slave obtains from natural sym- 
pathy is small, especially if he be a foreigner. 
Yet where the simplicity of manners allowed the 
master and the slave to share the same domestic 
pleasures and occupations, reciprocal affection 
sprang up ; among the Jews at least, the condition 
of the hireling, who had no fixed service or abode, 
was regarded as more miserable than servitude. 
We find that the Egyptians maintained an ho- 
nourable pre-eminence among the monarchies 
of early civilization, in regard to the protection 
of slaves, and the Mosaic code contained many 
provisions for alleviating their lot. 

Another circumstance which strongly character- 
izes the early monarchies of the East, is the division 
of the population into castes, or hereditary orders 
and professions, the son being limited to the occu- 
pation which his father had pursued. The extent 
to which this has been carried varies ; in Media 
and Persia, and in Judaea, only the sacerdotal body 
appear to have formed a caste ; in India and Egypt, 
the priests and warriors were certainly distinct from 
the other orders of the community, who were them- 
selves sub-divided into two or more hereditary 
classes, though we know not exactly on what 



INSTITUTION OF CASTES. 131 

principle. Nothing in the known history of 
these countries, or of Attica or Iberia, where a 
fourfold division prevailed, 1 indicates that this 
distinction was connected with an original differ- 
ence of race, or that it was produced by conquest, 
or established by positive legislation, or arranged 
by mutual compact. The circumstance that in 
some countries it extended only to the priests, 
who could not by force have obtained for them- 
selves exclusive privileges, points to some natural 
cause, operating in all ancient communities, but 
with variable force. Whoever possesses any know- 
ledge or skill which is denied to others, is raised 
by it to superior estimation, and even substantial 
power. This advantage he naturally seeks to per- 
petuate, like any other, in the line of his own 
descent, admits his children to the participation 
of his secret, but carefully excludes the stranger. 
The priest, who is believed to be alone in posses- 
sion of the all-important knowledge, how the 
favour of the gods is to be gained, and their wrath 
averted, easily transmits his monopoly to another 
generation; and in proportion as the system of 
theology becomes more complex and mysterious, 
or the ritual more elaborate, the difficulty of an 
1 Herod. 5, 66. Strabo. B. 8. p. 383. 



132 INSTITUTION OF CASTES. 

attempt to break through it is increased. The 
warrior, who trains his children to the use of arms, 
leaves them the means of maintaining themselves 
and their descendants, in a station only second to 
that of the priest. When the processes of art are 
not laid open in writing to the public, but com- 
municated by personal instruction, and a long 
course of practice under the teacher's eye, it is 
easy for the father to secure it as a craft and mys- 
tery to his son. This tendency throughout society, 
to the establishment of hereditary succession, 
manifests itself at the present day ; but being 
checked by the general diffusion of knowledge, 
the eagerness of competition, and the freedom of 
political institutions, it can never advance to the 
establishment of a caste. In the East, it was early 
adopted, more or less extensively, as a fundamental 
law of society ; the higher castes guarded the pu- 
rity of their blood, by refusing intermarriage with 
the lower, and resorted to mythic fiction, to give 
antiquity and divine sanction to their monopoly. 
In monarchies, the strict confinement of every 
man to the rank and occupation which his birth 
has assigned him, is a security against the ambi- 
tion which might aspire to the throne itself, and 
keeps society in that passive state, which is most 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 133 

safe and acceptable to those who enjoy exclusive 
privileges. In the earlier stages of civilization, 
the existence of castes may prevent the loss of 
knowledge or skill once acquired, as it certainly 
tends to retard the diffusion of that which has 
been gained. We might have been tempted to 
attribute chiefly to it the stability of Eastern 
governments, and the absence of progressive im- 
provement, did not the example of China, in 
which castes are unknown, prove that this is at 
least not the only cause from which monotony 
and uniformity may spring. 

The forms of religious belief which we find pre- 
vailing among the earliest civilized nations of anti- 
quity, present a similarity which must have been 
caused either by a common historical origin, or 
common principles in human nature. Whatever 
knowledge of a pure and spiritual theism may have 
been supernaturally communicated to men in pri- 
maeval times, was lost, except in the family of 
Abraham, in its Hebrew and Arabian branches, 
before history begins. We have, therefore, to re- 
gard the religion of the Egyptians or Babylonians, 
as the result of their own feeling and speculation 
like their opinions on natural or moral philosophy. 
The belief in an unseen Power appears to begin 



134 RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 

rather in feeling than in speculation . Man is con- 
scious of a double nature within himself; he feels 
that besides the body which he can touch, whose 
parts he can distinguish and assign to their several 
uses, there is something whose nature and seat he 
cannot define, whose substance he cannot grasp, 
at once interfused with the body and distinct from 
it, wielding its powers and guiding them by intel- 
ligence and a moral purpose. This internal feeling 
leads him to believe that the World beyond him- 
self is animated by a similar presiding Intelligence, 
and he explains its phenomena by the agency of 
a spiritual Essence which inhabits and informs it. 
To this conception of a god, he transfers his own 
moral feelings, and Providence is only a copy of 
the votary's internal being. So far he is a Mono- 
theist. But his speculation takes also a more ob- 
jective form; he sees in nature a variety of objects 
and energies, independent and even opposite in 
their qualities and operations, and creates an intel- 
ligent power, by which he supposes each of them 
to be animated. The former mode of conceiving 
of god, appears to lie nearer to the human mind ; 
but which has actually been first, in order of time, 
is a question very difficult to be decided on histo- 
rical testimony. Nations have been found, at a 



RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 135 

very low point in the scale of civilization, having 
no communication with tribes of more cultivated 
understanding, no source of supernatural know- 
ledge, who have conceived of the Supreme Being 
as one great Spirit. Even where the most com- 
plex system of polytheism had been established, 
in the popular belief and worship, there seems to 
have co- existed with it, not only in the philoso- 
phical, but also in the vulgar mind, a .recognition 
indicated by the forms of speech, 1 of one supreme 
controlling Power. Indeed, a complicated and well- 
defined system of mythology must be the work of 
a nation that has made no mean progress in cul- 
ture. Poetry and art must lend their aid to em- 
body and discriminate the vague conceptions with 
which polytheism begins. The Pelasgi worshipped 
the gods by a general appellation; the Hellenic 
poets of the school of Homer and Hesiod first 
gave them a history and distinguishing attributes, 2 
and inspired the artist with sublime models. 
Egypt, India, Babylonia and Phoenicia, are equally 
conspicuous for high civilization and for the extent 
of their Pantheon. In the systematized form in 



1 Cum jurant, et cum op- sed Deum nominant. Lactant. 
tant et cum gratias agrent, Div. Inst. 2, 1. 
non Jovem aut deos multos 2 Herod. 2, 53. 



136 CONTEMPLATIVE RELIGION. 

which mythology has reached us, we see every- 
where the endeavour to combine the notion of 
unity with that of multitude, by representing the 
many gods as manifestations or offspring of one, 
and by their subordination to preserve the har- 
mony of the whole. 

The belief in a spiritual divinity, naturally pro- 
duces the endeavour, by intense contemplation, to 
arrive at a more intimate union with God and 
more distinct conception of his being. Religion 
has assumed this form in India from the earliest 
recorded times ; how far it prevailed in the other 
countries of the East we know not, for a contem- 
plative religion does not, like a ritual, leave traces 
of itself in the works of art. Egypt was, in the 
Christian age, the parent of the eremitic and mo- 
nastic life ; and as religious history is only the 
development of certain principles inherent in man, 
modified by special circumstances and national cha- 
racter, it is probable that such a form of religion 
co-existed with the public and ceremonial in earlier 
times. A contemplative religion naturally be- 
comes ascetic ; the body is considered as an anta- 
gonist to the mind, impeding its operations and 
preventing its ascent to the Deity, and therefore 
to be mortified and reduced. The self-inflicted 



ORGIASTIC RELIGION. 137 

tortures of the ascetic belong to another feeling ; 
the same consciousness of guilt and the endeavour 
to conciliate God and avert his wrath, from which 
expiatory sacrifice had its origin. 

We may reasonably presume the high antiquity 
in the East, of the orgy, another manifestation of 
religious feeling. We see even in modern times, 
that the strong internal agitation which accom- 
panies it, shows itself externally in passionate 
cries, violent gestures and rapid movement. Sti- 
mulated by sympathy, and the accompaniments of 
a wild music and artificial light, it assumed the 
character of a frenzy. The prevalence of dancing, 
as a part of religious ceremonies, appears to be the 
effect of the same tendency in this feeling to find 
a vent and relief in movement, tempered and re- 
gulated by that sense of harmony and rhythm, 
which is one of the ultimate facts of the constitu- 
tion of man. 

Man naturally seeks to fill the immense void 
between himself and God, by peopling it with a 
race of intermediate beings, of whom the mind 
more easily conceives. Under various names, such 
a class of derived and inferior divinities appears in 
all the ancient theologies. The doctrine of ema- 
nations and incarnations appears to have had the 



138 ORIGIN OF POLYTHEISM. 

same source, the desire to invest a spiritual nature 
with some material form, which should render it 
more apprehensible by human faculties. Philo- 
sophy and popular religion have directly opposite 
tendencies. While philosophy, by reducing all 
the operations of nature under demonstrated laws, 
not only dispenses with intermediate supernatural 
agency, but even removes the Supreme cause to a 
dim and almost infinite distance, popular religion 
seeks to draw him down from the heaven of hea- 
vens, to nearer communion with his creatures and 
more immediate superintendence of their affairs. 
To this extent the religionist and the philosopher 
are necessarily antagonists ; but each holds a por- 
tion of the truth, and it is only intolerance, on the 
one side or the other, that makes them enemies. 

The theology of the Gentiles was long supposed 
to have originated in the deification of departed 
human spirits. The passions, actions and outward 
form of humanity, had been attributed to their 
gods so entirely by the Greeks and Romans, that 
it was almost an unavoidable inference, that they 
had once been human beings, raised to the rank of 
divinity by the gratitude of mankind. It suited 
the views of those who wished to bring the popular 
theology into contempt, so to consider the gods, 



ORIGIN OF POLYTHEISM. 139 

and Euhemerus, an Epicurean philosopher, feigned 
himself to have discovered, in a voyage to Panchaia, 
a record of their births and actions. 1 The Chris- 
tian writers availed themselves of this supposed 
origin, to expose the absurdity of polytheism; 
those who cultivated ancient history, after the re- 
vival of letters, adopted it very generally, and 
Osiris, Bacchus, Belus and Jupiter appear in their 
histories as sovereigns of their respective coun- 
tries. 2 This place they could not hold, when anti- 
quity was studied in a more free and comprehen- 
sive spirit, for it was found that no art could give 
historical consistency and chronological order to 
their supposed actions, even when the number of 
those who had borne the same name was multi- 
plied with the most arbitrary license. 3 The plau- 
sibility which this explanation wore, when applied 
to Greek or Roman mythology, disappeared when 
it was tried on those of other countries, whose gods 
retained more of their primitive character. No 
greater permanence has attended the opinion that 



1 Diod. Sic. Fr. lib. 6. 2, 3 Nullo prope sasculo de- 
632. ed. Wessel. fuit suus Jupiter usque ad 

2 Sir Isaac Newton's Chro- tempora belli Trojani. Voss. 
nology of Ancient Kingdoms Idol. 1, 14. p. 58. He reckons 
is entirely built on the basis of two if not three Argive Ju- 
Euhemerism, of the most ex- piters, two Cretan, &c. 
treme kind. 



140 ORIGIN OF POLYTHEISM. 

the Gentile Deities were the fallen angels, who 
thus revenged themselves on the true God, by 
usurping his honour; 1 or the personages of Scrip- 
ture history, Adam and the ante-diluvian Patri- 
archs, Noah and his sons, Abraham and his de- 
scendants. 2 It is indeed evident that the belief 
in gods cannot have begun with the deification of 
men, since the very act implies the previous con- 
ception of a god. Much of what we call the 
heroic worship of the Greeks, appears to have 
been only a worship of the great gods, under 
forgotten names; but when they really paid divine 
honours to the illustrious dead, they were quite 
aware of the nature of their worship, and distin- 
guished it, both in name and form, from that which 
they paid to the gods. 3 The deification of de- 
ceased rulers was a piece of flattery understood 
by all, and as little connected with serious belief, 
as the attribution of the title god, to a living king 
of Syria or Egypt. 



1 It happily survived to the His system appears to have 
time of Milton, and gave occa- still some followers in Eng- 
sion to the splendid passage, land. 

Par. Lost. 1. 380—475. 3 Herod. 2, 44. clearly marks 

2 Fourmont, Reflexions Cri- the different nature of these 
tiques sur les Anciens Peuples. two kinds of worship. That 
" Que Junon est Rebecca" is paid to the gods was Oveiv, to 
the title of Ch. 12. Lib. ii. § 3. heroes ivayifciv. 



ORIGIN OF POLYTHEISM. 141 

We must then seek in some other cause than 
the human origin of the gods, the explanation of 
the fact, that there is so much in ancient theology 
which resembles the history of human beings. 
Man extends to the world around him, the prin- 
cipal analogies of his own condition ; he does not 
rest satisfied with the simple personification of 
the powers of nature ; he endeavours to make 
this personality supply a solution to the great pro- 
blems which excite his curiosity. Life and its 
perpetual reproduction was one of these, and the 
most natural mode of conceiving of it was, to 
personify the energies of nature under the image 
of a male and female, to whose union the un- 
ceasing renewal of the world was ascribed. This 
idea pervades the mythologies of Egypt and Asia, 
and being carried out in symbolical narrative and 
rites, became a fertile source of the corrupt and 
debasing influence which polytheism exercised 
upon the public manners. The deities thus cre- 
ated by a rude philosophy and a sensual imagina- 
tion were easily identified with those objects and 
elements of nature which bear the most conspi- 
cuous part in the production of all things. The 
Sun, the noblest visible representation of invisible 
power, whose rays call forth the vital energies of 



142 ORIGIN OF POLYTHEISM. 

the world ; the Earth, which receives his influence 
and acknowledges it by her boundless fertility ; 
Water, which nourishes animal and vegetable life ; 
Fire, without whose genial influence torpor and 
death would overspread the world ; Air, which 
seems the very principle of life itself, — all these, 
in a double aspect, as male or female, became 
persons, and acquired a history. The heavenly 
bodies, Sun, Moon, and Planets, bear a real rela- 
tion, more or less influential, to our system ; and 
this, seen in obscure glimpses, in an age when 
true science was in its infancy, was exaggerated 
by imagination into a divine control over human 
affairs, exercised by gods who dwelt in those orbs, 
or were identified with them. The Sun and Moon, 
especially, were invested with the dignity of king 
and queen of heaven, a personification familiar to 
the poetry of all nations, and easily passing into 
popular belief and historical tradition. 1 When 
the world was once peopled with divinities thus 
created, the further extension of mythology and 
the character it assumed depended on the people 
among whom it was received. In Egypt and the 
East it hardly ever lost its original significance, 
as a symbolical expression ; the lively imagination 

1 Aapirpovs dwdaras, ifiirpsTrovras c»0epi. iEsch. Ag. 6. Gen. 1.16. 



GOOD AND EVIL PRINCIPLE. 143 

of the Greeks expanded and adorned it with so 
much adventitious matter, having no relation to 
its original purpose, that in their mythology a 
symbolical meaning is rarely visible. Intellectual 
abstractions and moral qualities also from personi- 
fications passed into persons, who were reputed 
to have been deified for the possession, in a pre- 
eminent degree, of the quality which they repre- 
sented. 

That fear first led men to believe in the gods, 1 is 
an assertion without historical evidence ; but as na- 
ture and life and man's own frame contain a mixture 
of good and evil, their reflected image, the superna- 
tural beings who preside over the powers of the 
Universe, and control the course of human events, 
could not be purely benevolent. To regard evil 
as corrective, and therefore as a part of the plan 
of a beneficent Providence, is a comprehension of 
view which reason never seems to have attained ; 
and even the earliest mythology of the East bears 
marks of its struggle to effect some solution of 
this painful mystery. The Persian theology makes 
a formal division of power between the good and 
evil Principle, retaining only the triumph of the 
good, as the final consummation ; and the same 
1 Stat. Theb. 3, 661. 



144 GOOD AND EVIL PRINCIPLE. 

doctrine appears, though less distinctly, in the 
creed of the Mesopotamian nations, whose Satan 
was a subordinate and dependent being, the mi- 
nister, not the rival and enemy, of the supreme 
God. The Indian theology makes good alone to 
have been the purpose of the Creator, evil the 
result of transgression, but assigns no special 
deity as the representative of the evil Principle. 1 
In the characters and actions of the Grecian divini- 
ties, good and bad are so much mingled, that no 
necessity appears to have been felt to erect the 
powers of evil into a distinct existence. 

Though fear did not create the gods, it was a 
predominant element in those conceptions of 
them, of which prayer and worship are the ex- 
pression ; the mind of man being more accessible 
to religious emotions in the apprehension of suffer- 
ing, than in the enjoyment or anticipation of good; 
and more quick to observe the marks of superna- 
tural agency, in those events which appear to in- 
terrupt the usual and beneficent operation of the 
powers of nature. The god of an ignorant and 
superstitious people is made in the image of man, 
not only endowed with the form and organs of 
humanity, but partaking of its feelings and im- 
1 Bohlen altes Indien, 1, 166. 



SACRIFICE. 145 

perfections. Sacrifices were offered with various 
motives, and infinite diversity of manner, but all 
resolve themselves into an assimilation of the divi- 
nity to the worshipper. The first and choicest of 
the fruits of the earth were presented to the god 
who had given them, as the natural expression of 
gratitude ; among living things, some were only 
consecrated to him, by being exempted from their 
usual office of ministering to the use of man, that 
the sincerity of the offerer might be proved by his 
renouncing all future profit from his gift. 1 It was 
sometimes more completely alienated, by being 
slain and burnt, that its smoke and savour might 
ascend to the upper regions, where the gods were 
supposed to have their special dwelling-place. But 
sacrifice had other and darker aspects. The dis- 
pleasure and vengeance of men are not always dis- 
criminating, nor in their degree proportioned to 
their cause. If prevented from wreaking them on 
the person of the offender, they are soothed and 
appeased by inflicting loss on his property or his 
kindred. By skilfully presenting to the angry 
man, some object on which his rage may spend 
itself, the cause of his displeasure may hope to 
escape. The transference of such passionate blind - 
1 S. Chrys. apud Outram de Sacrifices, p. 7. 
H 



146 SACRIFICE. 

ness to the gods, appears to have been the origin 
of deprecatory and expiatory sacrifices, which have 
been bloody and barbarous, in proportion to the 
ignorance and rudeness of the people by whom 
they have been practised, or the magnitude of 
the evil which they were designed to avert. If 
the blood of brute animals were not sufficiently 
costly to appease divine wrath, a human substi- 
tute was offered, and the sacrifice by which the 
feelings of nature were most deeply wounded, was 
deemed most likely to be efficacious. Panic terror, 
when it has only an earthly object, can efface all 
natural affection ; the dread of the displeasure of 
the gods, in times of public calamity, has so 
overpowered all other sentiments, that heca- 
tombs of human victims have been offered up, 
in the hope of averting it. It belongs to the 
special history of every country to point out the 
variety of forms which the same principle has 
assumed, but the key to them all will be found 
in the proneness of man to suppose that the god 
whom he worships is " altogether such a one as 
himself." 

The belief in the existence of a thinking and 
conscious principle in man, which the dissolution 
of the body does not destroy, was diffused among 






IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 147 

all the nations of the highest antiquity. 1 The 
analogies of material nature could furnish no 
ground for believing in the separate existence of 
spirit. It is so closely connected with the belief 
in God, that its origin is probably the same ; the 
internal consciousness that the seat of the intellect 
and the moral qualities is something distinct from 
the body, which may therefore not only not be 
affected by its destruction, but may even be more 
perfect and happy when freed from its corporeal 
shackles. 

The idea of God being derived, as we have seen, 
from the consciousness of man, it was natural that 
the soul in which that consciousness resides should 
be identified with the divine nature which it re- 
sembles, and be considered as a portion of its 
essence, temporarily united with the body. 

With the conception of the soul as indestructible, 
the idea of a retributory state has been united in va- 
rious forms. Such a doctrine is forced upon the mind 
which has acquired even the most imperfect idea of 
Providence and a moral governor, by the unequal 
retribution of the present state. Among the old- 
est nations, the Egyptians and Indians, it appears 
in a very remarkable form — the transmigration of 
1 Windet De Vita functorum statu. 

h2 



148 IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 

souls. The Persian doctrine of a resurrection 
does not appear to have penetrated to the Meso- 
potamian nations at a very early time, as we find 
no traces of it among the Jews, till after the Cap- 
tivity, nor have we any distinct accounts of the 
belief of the Babylonians and Assyrians on this 
point. The Greeks and the nations of kindred 
origin, from the earliest times, entertained the 
notion of a state of retribution, in Elysium or 
Tartarus, immediately succeeding the present life; 
yet even among them, traces of a belief in the 
return of the soul to occupy a human body may 
be found. 1 The conceptions of an unseen state 
cannot be very definite or constant, and it is not 
surprising if some usages or modes of speech seem 
to regard death as the extinction of being, and 
others as a transition or advancement to a higher 
state. The belief in the existence of disembodied 
spirits mingled itself in various ways with the 
other articles of theology. A continued con- 
sciousness and activity suggested the idea of in- 
terest and participation in the events of the world. 
A higher prescience and supernatural power, an 
intermediate rank between mortals and immor- 
tals, seemed to belong to those who resembled 
1 Pind. Olymp. 2, 122. 



SACERDOTAL ORDER. 149 

the gods in their spiritual nature, and they were 
propitiated, and their favourable intervention in- 
voked, by a peculiar ritual. 

In all the early civilized countries we find an 
order of men, a priesthood, specially consecrated to 
the offices of religion. A practice so universal must 
have its origin in an universal feeling. Invisible 
power is invested at once with sanctity and awe in 
the believer's mind ; he thinks himself not pure 
enough to hold a direct intercourse with his god, 
and seeks some one whom he regards as more 
holy, to act as his mediator. He endeavours to 
find an intercessor with god, as he would with his 
sovereign, if he had occasion to ask his favour or 
deprecate his anger, in a person of higher rank, 
greater refinement, or superior moral and intel- 
lectual qualities, who from these causes may have 
more ready access and more favourable audience 
than himself. The parent would naturally be the 
priest in the simple rites of domestic religion; 
the patriarchal head in those of his tribe ; the 
chief of the nation, in national festivities and 
sacrifices. In a more elaborate system of faith 
and worship, the duties of the priesthood grow so 
numerous that they suffice for the occupation of a 
life ; the idea of purity, moral and physical, is 



150 SACERDOTAL ORDER. 

refined upon and exalted, so that a separation 
from ordinary pursuits, seclusion within the walls 
of a sanctuary, the devotion of a considerable 
portion of life to ablution, meditation and prayer, 
become essential to the character of the mediator 
between God and man ; and the distinction arises 
of the priest from the layman. An order of men 
so created, especially when it has become heredi- 
tary, rapidly increases in influence and wealth. 
Their predominant influence in the state is cha- 
racteristic of all the forms of polity which in the 
ancient world preceded the rise of the Grecian 
commonwealths. It rose to the greatest height 
in Egypt, where perhaps, before the commence- 
ment of the monarchy, the priests constituted a 
theocracy, i. e. exercised the powers of government 
in the name of the gods. Since the belief in a 
deity is inseparable from the mind of man, a 
priesthood may be regarded, in some form or 
other, as one of the most truly primaeval institu- 
tions. A sacerdotal order soon adopts purposes 
and a policy which may be hostile to the interests 
of other classes in the community; and it is 
tempted to extend and uphold its power by 
hypocrisy and fraud. But it is not in such arts 
that their authority begins • a strong and general 



IDOLATRY. 151 

feeling must give birth to an institution which 
everywhere accompanies the existence of religion. 
It is when faith begins to languish, and the yoke 
of sacerdotal dominion to be impatiently borne, 
that a priesthood is tempted to use violence or 
fraud to prolong its power. 

Idolatry is found everywhere in early history 
as the companion of polytheism. It is the re- 
source of the mind, unable to keep its own ab- 
stractions steadily before its view ; and the natural 
result of a tendency to use visible things, as the 
symbol of the invisible, and the propensity of man 
to attribute a human form to his divinities. The 
Persians are almost a solitary exception ; and that 
they had neither statues nor altars was probably 
owing to their religion being a pure worship of the 
heavenly bodies and the elements, 1 which needed no 
symbols, as they are not abstractions but sensible 
realities. When the art of statuary was unknown, 
the rudest resemblance to the human form was suf- 
ficient to invest a block of stone or stock of wood 
with this symbolical character. Such were the Cy- 
bele of Pessinus, the conical stone of the Paphian 
Venus, and the god Elagabalus, 2 which, even in an 
age familiar with the most perfect productions 

1 Herod. 1, 131. Creuz. Mythol. 1, 182. 2 Herodian, 5, 5. 



152 



IDOLATRY. 



of sculpture, retained a traditional sanctity, and 
were more highly valued for the evidence of an- 
tiquity which the absence of art furnished. Un- 
der the name of Fetisch worship, this homage paid 
to a shapeless mass has been regarded as marking 
the lowest point of idolatry; yet it does not 
appear probable that even the most senseless ido- 
later really believes a lifeless image to be god. 
Like the sword and spear of Mars, which the 
Scythians and Romans worshipped, 1 it is a sym- 
bol ; but the sign readily becomes a substitute for 
the thing signified, and the use of any material 
emblem of the deity tends to detain the mind in 
gross and unspiritual conceptions. 

Superstition is, in substance, a false philosophy; 
but while the error of a philosophical inquirer into 
nature terminates with the assumption of an 
imaginary law, or non-existent principle, supersti- 
tion usually creates some being of super-human 
power, endowed with passions and a will, to whose 
agency it attributes the phenomenon by which it 
is perplexed. In either case, however, we shall 
find, that the source of the error is false reason- 
ing from effects to causes, incomplete induction, 
hasty admission of unascertained facts, confusion 
1 Voss. de Idol. lib. 6. p. 150. Varro Fragm. l.p.375 ed. Bip. 



SUPERSTITION. 153 

of accidental resemblances with real analogies. 
This is very remarkably seen in the belief uni- 
versally prevalent in the earliest ages, that a fore- 
knowledge of the future may be obtained. Had 
there been in the present no foreshadowing of 
events to come, man would have learned to ac- 
quiesce in a hopeless ignorance. But the present 
is really pregnant with the future ; sagacity can 
anticipate the general effect of causes which even 
now are in operation. This, however, is far from 
satisfying the craving of human curiosity, which 
seeks a knowledge of specific events and especially 
of coming evil. The modes which have been 
adopted for attaining it have not been arbitrarily 
chosen. Many of them consisted in attempts to 
draw forth from the gods the secret of their own 
decrees ; or from inferior deities that knowledge 
of the counsels of the supreme god, which their 
relation to him enabled them to acquire ; or from 
departed spirits some revelation of those myste- 
ries of destiny, which they were supposed to be 
better able to penetrate in their disembodied state. 
As these supernatural beings partake of human 
weakness, it was thought that they might be 
soothed by gifts, driven by importunate intreaty, 
or even entrapped by dexterous management, into 
h 5 



154 DIVINATION. 

the disclosure of the secret which they had deter- 
mined to keep in their own breasts. The hea- 
venly bodies accomplish their own times with such 
unerring regularity, that they seem endowed with 
prescience, as well as volition, and look down on 
human affairs with such a bright and comprehen- 
sive gaze, that all knowledge appears to lie open 
to them. Their movements regulate the seasons, 
which involve so many points of interest to man, 
and it is not wonderful if he should have ex- 
tended this influence to other things, on which 
their position and combination has no real effect. 
What Virgil, in the spirit of Epicurean philoso- 
phy denied, 1 that a portion of the divine spirit 
dwells in the brute creation, and produces the 
instinctive sagacity which surpasses our reason, is 
quite in accordance with popular belief, and must 
have seemed a good ground for attributing to 
them foreknowledge of other things, besides what 
regarded their own life and wants. The birds, 
from their abode in the air, were presumed to be 
nearer to the gods, and better acquainted with 
their secrets than other animals ; the eagle tower- 
ing into the skies, returns thence as if from the 
immediate presence of the deity. The thunder 
1 Georg. 1, 415. 



SUPERSTITION ATTACHED TO NUMBERS. 155 

and lightning, issuing from the same mysterious 
region, seem like the voice of a god, or a written 
proclamation of his will, traced in characters of 
fire. To judge of the future from inspection of 
the entrails of a victim, and hope or fear, accord- 
ing as the liver was diseased or sound, seems the 
extreme of childish superstition ; yet no doubt it 
had been observed, that the lower animals are 
affected sometimes even before man, by epidemic 
diseases ; l and thus the approach of a public cala- 
mity might truly be read in the unsound state of 
the organs of a slaughtered animal. These are 
indeed slight foundations for the complex science 
of a Chaldean soothsayer or Tuscan augur; nor 
can we always perceive even this slight ground for 
the practices of divination ; it is enough that, when 
their origin can be traced, it appears to be the 
exaggeration of a connection which really exists, 
the fanciful extension of a true analogy. 

The superstition which from the earliest ages 
has attached to certain numbers, has had its origin 
in their occurrence in the changes of nature, and 
in the periodicity of some of the phsenomena of 
life. 2 Seven is the number of the planets ac- 
cording to the ancient notion, which included the 
1 Schol. Vill. ad Horn. II. A, 50. 2 Varro ap. Gell. 3, 10. 



156 OMENS. 

Sun and Moon ; twelve, the changes of the Moon 
in a year ; thirty, the approximate number of days 
in a lunation. To all these numbers, and others 
produced by their combination, a mysterious vir- 
tue has evidently been attached. They have been 
adopted in preference to others, where division 
may seem arbitrary ; they recur in mythology and 
mythic history. 

The proneness of man to consider himself as 
the central point of the system to which he be- 
longs, and his own welfare as its primary and 
highest object, has greatly enlarged the range of 
superstitious belief and practice in regard to divi- 
nation. To warn him of approaching evil, or point 
out to him the means of acquiring good, is a 
purpose of sufficient importance, to justify por- 
tents in heaven and earth ; and in ages of little 
scientific culture this tendency to refer everything 
to himself is not counteracted by any knowledge 
of the true relations of Nature, or the unchange- 
ableness of her laws. This disposition to believe 
the world around him to be full of the indica- 
tions of his own destiny^ is allied to that which 
leads him to make external nature a symbol and 
emblem of his own feelings, in the language of 
religion, of poetry, and art. For religion, and 



DREAMS. 157 

its degenerate form superstition, are essentially 
states of excited imagination. 

The influence of dreams, in the earliest ages, as 
indications of the future, deserves to be especially 
noticed, from its connection with great historical 
events. The dreams of Pharaoh changed the his- 
tory of the Jewish people ; Sabaco withdrew from 
Egypt in obedience to a dream; Astyages exposed 
his grandson, and ultimately overturned his own 
empire, through terror of a dream. The dream 
of Xerxes decided the invasion of Greece, and 
remotely the fate of Persia; the dream of Cal- 
purnia, in a less philosophical age, would have 
prevented the assassination of Csesar. That a 
man should permit the incoherent suggestions of 
sleep to guide his actions, and even to set aside 
the combinations of sagacity, appears hardly con- 
sistent with the attribute of reason. Yet it has a 
natural cause. The mind often reproduces in 
dreams the results of the meditations of the day, 
and presents them with a scenic vividness which 
impresses them more strongly than mere medita- 
tion. This connection, however, is not perceived, 
when the laws which regulate our trains of 
thought have not been studied : it is because the 
dream springs up within the mind itself, that it 



158 DREAMS. 

carries more authority than the deductions of 
reason. Detached from all impressions of the 
world of sense, the mind is more fitted for receiv- 
ing communications from the world of spirit, and 
the convictions thus stamped upon it appear to 
proceed from a divine hand. It is on the same 
principle, that words casually spoken or taken out 
of their real connection, have been supposed to 
carry a supernatural import, and the gods to 
speak through the mouths of those whose facul- 
ties are suspended by a trance or a fit, or even 
impaired by fatuity. We are prone also to notice 
the exception, more than the rule, of our expe- 
rience ; and hence one remarkable coincidence 
between a supposed prognostic and the event pro- 
cures credit for such a mode of judging of the 
future, which many failures cannot destroy. 

Such is the appearance which society presents, 
when its features first become visible to us in the 
dawn of historic times, in Egypt and the East. 
We may rely with some confidence on the general 
causes which have been assigned for its peculia- 
rities, because they are found in human nature, 
and are invariable. The special causes, the histo- 
rical events which determined the distribution of 



LATE ORIGIN OF HISTORY. 159 

population, the peculiar forms of religion and go- 
vernment, the state of knowledge and art, elude 
our research ; they have not been recorded, and 
cannot be divined. Nor have we reason to hope 
that monuments and records will carry the com- 
mencement of history much further back, because 
the application of writing to the preservation of 
facts has been late, or time has destroyed its 
earliest results. The discoveries in Egyptian anti- 
quities have only introduced a continuous chro- 
nology into periods of which we had no previous 
measure, and filled blank spaces with historical 
names and events ; they have established the credit 
of accounts which had previously been viewed with 
scepticism, but they have added nothing to our 
knowledge of the commencement of the history of 
Egypt, the origin of its population, arts, laws and 
religion. When civilization has regained posses- 
sion of its ancient seats in Asia, monuments now 
covered by the soil may be brought to light, and 
patient research unravel the secret of their myste- 
rious characters. But there will still remain, 
before the earliest inscription, ages which we must 
be content to know only in their results, the in- 
fancy of the human race, too unconscious of its 
relation to the future, to reflect upon and re- 



160 IMPERFECTION OF EARLY HISTORY. 

gister the steps by which it was advancing to 
maturity. 

The causes which have buried primaeval history 
in impenetrable darkness, extend their influence 
over many centuries, and make our knowledge of 
them obscure, imperfect, and comparatively unin- 
structive. Were not the impulse to possess our- 
selves of any information respecting the past irre- 
sistible, we might wonder at the eagerness with 
which we endeavour to establish on evidence, only 
probable at best, a few insulated facts in the histo- 
tories of Egypt or Assyria. Their monuments 
show by their magnitude and durability the vast 
amount of labour concentrated in their execution, 
and hence enable us to infer the wealth and popu- 
lation of the kingdom, and the powers which 
despotism gave to the monarch, of employing the 
labour of his subjects for his own gratification, or 
the authority of the religion, to whose rites these 
structures were dedicated. But how little can we 
learn of that which makes history most valuable, 
of the characters of sovereigns, of civil, military and 
religious institutions, of laws and their influence 
on the happiness of the community ! Only nations 
which have left us literature, as well as monuments, 
can be so fully known, as either to be intelligible 



IMPERFECTION OF EARLY HISTORY. 161 

themselves, or furnish us with any principles of 
historical philosophy. If the hopes of some san- 
guine antiquaries should be realized, and we should 
find ourselves in possession of a written history of 
the age of Rameses the Great, more light will 
probably be thrown on the condition of Egypt 
than all its monuments have hitherto afforded us. 
The Jewish people have no monuments ; not an 
inscribed stone, not a sculpture or a fresco, re- 
mains from the times of their distinct existence, 
none at least that bears anything of a national cha- 
racter. But they have left us a literature of copi- 
ousness and variety, unexampled in the ages in 
which it was produced. From it we learn the 
origin and fortunes of the people, the influence of 
outward circumstances and their own peculiar in- 
stitutions in the formation of their character; 
their alternations of prosperity and depression, of 
improvement or degeneracy ; their public history 
and domestic life ; not only the outward forms of 
their religion, but its influence, as penetrating and 
modifying the whole national mind. They are, 
therefore, the only nation of equal antiquity whom 
we really know. The mighty monarchies in their 
neighbourhood, between whom they preserved a 
precarious existence, are not understood by us; 



162 



IMPERFECTION OF EARLY HISTORY, 



we see them only in the mass, in the exploits of 
conquering sovereigns, while the true connection of 
the events of their history, the internal life of the 
people, escape from us. It is not till the Greeks 
began to turn their inquisitive gaze upon Egypt 
and the East, that these countries emerge into day- 
light ; and it is only in Greece itself, under the 
combined influence of science, literature and free- 
dom, that the perfect idea of history was realized. 



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